This year, the Oklahoma Sooners boast the best defense they’ve had in a long time. It may not be the elite unit that head coach [autotag]Brent Venables[/autotag] and defensive coordinator [autotag]Zac Alley[/autotag] are shooting for, but it’s still the best in years.
Unfortunately, OU’s offense has fallen off a cliff, and the Sooners are just 6-5 in 2024 with one regular season game left. However, the OU defense was unbelievable in the upset win over Alabama last week.
One metric that shows how well the Oklahoma defense has played this year is “stop rate.” ESPN and staff writer Max Olson compiled all 134 FBS defenses in 2024, ranking them by their defensive stop rate.
What is stop rate? It’s a basic measurement of success: the percentage of a defense’s drives that end in punts, turnovers or a turnover on downs. – Olson, ESPN
Heading into the final week of the regular season, Oklahoma ranks 12th in the country in stop rate, stopping the opposition 72.1 percent of the time. It’s one spot below Miami (Ohio) and one spot above Indiana. The Sooners allow just 1.41 points per drive.
The job Venables and Alley have done with the defense this season has been excellent, especially considering the woeful place it was in when the head coach found it three years ago. No one can argue that he hasn’t improved that side of the ball mightily.
However, it’s what he does on the other side of the ball that will determine whether or not the Sooners get back to the place they want to be alongside the elites of college football.
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