Heading into the Cotton Bowl on Saturday, Dillon Gabriel is playing his best football ahead of the Oklahoma Sooners’ biggest test.
The Oklahoma Sooners take on their biggest challenge of the season this Saturday in Dallas in the 119th meeting of the [autotag]Red River Rivalry[/autotag].
It’ll be a fantastic battle, unlike what we saw in the 2022 game. These two teams are coming in 5-0 and coming in with two quarterbacks that are playing the best football of their collegiate careers. Dillon Gabriel has been on a roll all season. Over the last couple of weeks, in particular, he accounted for 728 total yards and seven total touchdowns.
Gabriel has leveled up his game from a year ago. He looks like a more confident player in his fifth season and second as the starting quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners.
And the numbers bear that out.
Through five games in 2023, Dillon Gabriel is completing 74.5% of his passes for 1,589 yards and 15 touchdowns. He also has four rushing touchdowns this season.
Through the first five games a year ago, Gabriel was completing just 64% of his passes for 1,215 yards and had thrown only 11 touchdowns. In his first five games last year he only had two rushing scores.
Yes, one of those games was the TCU game in which he was knocked out due to a concussion, but even if he finished that game, his yardage and total touchdown numbers wouldn’t equate, and he’s completing a higher percentage of his passes this year.
One area in which Gabriel’s shown much improvement is in his work over the middle of the field. According to Pro Football Focus, in 2022, Gabriel completed just 42% of his passes 10 yards or more down the middle of the field. For the season, he threw for 768 yards, seven touchdowns, and three interceptions when throwing over the middle beyond 10 yards.
He’s nearly equaled those numbers in 2023.
This year, Gabriel has completed 67% of his passes for 652 yards and has thrown six touchdowns and one interception when throwing 10 or more yards down the middle of the field.
It’s one of the reasons the Oklahoma Sooners offense has been so much better. Gabriel is finding success in the middle of the field, which means teams have to respect every area of the field. That opens things up more on the outside where Jeff Lebby wants to live with the screen game.
As the Oklahoma Sooners have struggled to get their ground game going, they’ve been forced to lean on Gabriel more. And he’s responded.
He has four 300-yard days and is averaging 317 passing yards per game. The one game in 2023 in which Gabriel didn’t throw for 300 yards was the SMU game. The coaching staff took the air out of the ball in an attempt to get the ground game going. But when the Sooners were ready to distance themselves from the Mustangs, whose hand did they put the ball in late in the game? Dillon Gabriel’s.
As the Sooners prepare for their toughest test to date, they’re going to hope to find some traction with the running game. However, against one of the top 15 run defenses in college football, that’s no simple task. But [autotag]Brent Venables[/autotag], [autotag]Jeff Lebby[/autotag], and the Oklahoma Sooners can rest easy knowing their quarterback is playing the best football of his career going into the biggest game of his career.
OU-Texas is a place where legends are born. Can Dillon Gabriel earn that status this Saturday in Dallas? Everything is trending in that direction.
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