On Tuesday, Lincoln Riley spoke to the media and provided his thoughts after the season’s first month. With three of the Sooners’ first four games coming down the wire, Riley addressed concerns that Oklahoma is simply “surviving” each week.
Surviving vs. go take them and win them and I feel like we’ve gone and taken them and won them It’s great to be in all these different situations. You can’t simulate those. I think some of the guts and toughness that our football team has showed early in the season is, I think, a cause for a lot of our excitement as a staff and the team’s excitement that if we can continue to improve and get to the level of play that we feel like we’re capable of, you combine that with the toughness and resiliency of being in the tough moments, typically that makes for a good football team. – Lincoln Riley credit Sooners Sports TV
While Oklahoma’s close games against FBS competition are objectively a cause for concern, there are encouraging signs underneath how OU is winning them.
If the Sooners were winning games off opponent fumbles or missed field goals, then a definitive argument could be made that the Sooners are, in fact, “merely surviving.” But Riley is correct. Oklahoma is “taking” these close wins.
In week one, Nik Bonitto and Perion Winfrey sacked Tulane quarterback Michael Pratt on a critical third down with two minutes remaining. On the very next play, Delarrin Turner-Yell stopped Pratt a yard short of the marker to shut the door on the Green Wave.
Against the Cornhuskers, OU’s defensive front stood tall once more to sack quarterback Adrian Martinez twice in the final minute to kill the clock and prevent a go-ahead score.
Saturday vs. WVU was the first time this season that Oklahoma needed to drive for a go-ahead score in the final minutes. The offense responded with a 14-play 80-yard drive where Spencer Rattler shrugged off a stadium of boos to go a perfect six-for-six to set up Gabe Brkic for the game-winning field goal.
With the exception of week two’s 76-0 blowout win over Western Carolina, the final scores of Oklahoma’s games have been alarming. But in each and every one of them, the Sooners’ have made their own luck and not relied on an opponent’s miscue to win the game.
That is the difference between “surviving” a close game or earning the win. And I believe that’s why Riley is still confident in the 2021 Sooners.