When the Oklahoma Sooners lost 49-0 to the Texas Longhorns in the Red River Showdown, I said it couldn’t get worse than that. I was wrong.
The Sooners are officially at rock bottom.
OU played a fully-loaded Longhorns offense without Dillon Gabriel at quarterback. There was an excuse for losing to Texas. The Longhorns do a lot of things very well on the football field.
The West Virginia Mountaineers do not.
They were the worst team in the Big 12. Dillon Gabriel and the offense were healthy. There’s no excuse for losing this game. West Virginia entered the contest allowing 276 passing yards per game, 118th in the nation. Gabriel mustered just 190 yards.
Oklahoma’s offense was Eric Gray and one big play from the passing attack. But even Gray’s 211 yards rushing weren’t enough to get a win against the Mountaineers. It was the eighth time in program history that the Sooners had lost a game in which a player ran for more than 200 yards. And it was only the third time since 2000.
Oklahoma was 1 of 11 on third down against a middling defense. That and the defense’s inability to stop West Virginia on fourth down sunk the Sooners.
On defense, the problems that plagued them against Kansas State and TCU got them again as Garrett Greene exposed Oklahoma’s inability to stop the quarterback run game. Greene completed a few passes, but it was his efforts on the ground that one the game for West Virginia. Greene ran for over 100 yards in little more than a half of work for the Mountaineers.
At some point, we need to stop talking about how Lincoln Riley gutted this program. The Sooners still need to win these football games. Even when Brent Venables does get all his recruits in the building, this is still football. Someone is going to be hurt. Someone is going to have an off day. Things are never going to be perfect. Sometimes there’s just adversity that the Sooners are going to have to deal with.
The Sooners had enough to work with to put a three-win West Virginia team in the ground. The Mountaineers are not a good football team.
I’m not hitting the panic button on the Venables hire. It’s year one. If these problems are still there next year, then we can have this conversation. Until then, the Sooners have to get ready for Bedlam, make it to a bowl game, and keep the recruiting class together.
Stay the course, Coach Venables.
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