With the impact of the coronavirus taking out spring football for all of college football, Oklahoma is in the same peculiar situation as everyone else.
Lincoln Riley hasn’t been content with how the playing field hasn’t been even across all of college football in terms of the communication between the coaching staff and players. The Sooners had plenty of position battles to start to work through during spring football and Alex Grinch continuing to revamp the Oklahoma defense in year two.
Riley made a two-week hiatus from talking to the media on Wednesday, going on Oklahoma play-by-play voice Toby Rowland’s radio show for an 11-minute segment discussing everything from the last two weeks.
Here is what Oklahoma’s head coach had to say about being ready to play a 2020 football season and the pending quarterback competition
ON THE 2020 FOOTBALL SEASON AND IF A TEAM CAN GET READY WITH LOSING THE SPRING:
“It’s going to be predetermined to our nation’s response to this virus and how seriously people take it and one, do we all take the steps to not only protect ourselves, but more importantly protect each other. Hopefully our nation will continue to get more serious about this and respond in a positive way. If that happens and we’re able to train our guys over the summer like we normally do, we get quite a few practices—we get 20 plus practices in fall camp, that’s enough to get a team ready to play. Now, are our guys going to have develop as much or are some of the guys going to miss spring football—of course. That’s a key time to develop guys, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily from a health standpoint or safety, any of that, I don’t know that it’s necessary to get somebody actually just ready to play football. I think with 20 plus practices and if we are able to get them on campus here some in the summer to train them, get them physically ready for camp, 20 plus practices in Aug., then we’ll be ready to play football. And by that time, I think the nation will need that.”
ON THE LOSS OF TIME FOR THE QUARTERBACK COMPETITION
“Honestly it is a lot better than if it were last year. For a lot of reasons with our football team. Obviously defensively. From an offensive line perspective with just how crazy and inexperienced we were last year. Our quarterbacks … your correct, neither one of them have played a ton of snaps at the college level, but I wasn’t going to be able help that through spring practice and fall camp anyway. That’s not going to change until we play games. The thing that is different this year is these guys have both been in our system now for awhile. They have been in our program now for awhile and you could tell. Even in the one day at practice that we got, I felt like we had two experienced guys out there and we do in my mind. They know what we’re doing. They know how to run our stuff. Now, can they obviously get better and are the reps beneficial to them? Of course they are. They are beneficial to anybody. But these guys will be ready to play. I’ll be excited to get them back and get back to work with them, but I know they are two pretty driven guys that will be getting a lot of work while they are outside of here.”
[lawrence-auto-related count=3]