This crazy, chaotic 2007 — I mean 2015 — college football season continues to spit out one eye-popping plot twist after another.
However, if you were reading TSS during the week, you would have known that what happened on Saturday afternoon inside the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas was hardly unprecedented.
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Earlier this week, columnist Allen Kenney noted that over the years, the Red River Shootout between the Oklahoma Sooners and Texas Longhorns has become an emotional cocktail. More precisely, the team immersed in turmoil before the game has — on several occasions — managed to make that passion an asset and not a liability in Dallas.
What’s worth emphasizing here is that if Texas’s 24-17 win over Oklahoma in 2015 feels strange and isolated to you… it shouldn’t.
What you saw on Saturday afternoon happened two years earlier as well.
It was an odd year, meaning that the San Francisco Giants were not in the baseball playoffs. The St. Louis Cardinals were the National League favorites. In the Big 12, Texas wore home burnt orange in Dallas, while OU wore its road whites.
Of more significance in 2013, Texas was a 14-point underdog as Mack Brown took his flagging career into the venerable Cotton Bowl one more time. Oklahoma was supposed to smash Texas and a quarterback who wasn’t supposed to be up for the challenge.
Case McCoy, however, showed the Sooners a thing or two, in what was by far his best game as a Longhorn:
Two years later, the Texas coach was different, but also facing a heckuva lotta heat.
Charlie Strong had a lot of Texas fans (including the Texas Rangers’ now-fired social media intern) calling for his head on a platter. No, he wasn’t nearly as likely to be fired after this season as Mack Brown was in the middle of the 2013 campaign, but the fact that the “noise in the system” had grown to a near-deafening level in Strong’s second season marked a significant development in its own right.
Texas was a 17.5-point underdog, even worse than in 2013. Longhorn quarterback Jarrod Heard had played so well against California, but he regressed against Oklahoma State and crashed to the bottom of the canyon last Saturday against TCU. While it’s true that there was precedent for Texas to be able to beat Oklahoma from such a profound underdog position, that same fact gave OU head coach Bob Stoops the ability to tell his team, “Hey, this was the backdrop before the 2013 game, and look what happened. Don’t let it happen today, fellas.”
Yet, a sports team with a lot of new faces — even if some were on the roster in the recent past — often fails to internalize a message from its leaders.
Clearly, Oklahoma did not play this game with the urgency the moment demanded. The Sooners obviously had to learn the hard way about matching a determined underdog’s energy level.
Texas was good enough — for a long-enough period of time — to make Oklahoma pay a supreme price.
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The most striking feature of this game is not that Oklahoma played poorly. Humans are imperfect beings, subject to failure and fluctuations in performance. On some days at work — or in any kind of endeavor — we are not at our best. This isn’t a deficiency of talent or will, but a product of the inevitable flow of life. We can strive for consistency, and some attain it more than others. However, no two days are going to be exactly alike in terms of what happens, how it happens, and what outside events either constrain or aid the attempt to excel at a given pursuit.
However, while outcomes and capacities might differ from day to day or week to week, the one thing which should remain consistent with human beings — imperfect though we are — is effort.
Pitchers might not have good stuff, but they can still work hard to locate the ball and change speeds to get hitters out.
Parents might be cranky at their kids, but feeling irritated doesn’t — and can’t — lead to utter neglect of one’s child. The effort of caring for a son or daughter goes on, regardless of how one feels.
We human beings are imperfect, but we carry on. We are resilient and made to be that way. We can always give effort when results are lacking or situations are less than optimal.
The problem with Oklahoma against Texas on Saturday is simply this: It took the Sooners two and a half quarters to begin to play with the effort they needed to win this game. Playing poorly? That happens. Failing to compete and strive as fully as one’s less-talented opponent? That’s unacceptable, and yet it’s happened twice in three years now for Bob Stoops and Oklahoma.
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It’s really rather alarming, and for reasons beyond the simple fact that OU is now behind Baylor and TCU in the Big 12 race, still having to play those two schools (the Bears in Waco): Oklahoma just doesn’t impose itself on opponents anymore. This is not a new development, but it characterizes the post-2010 Sooners, the program whose dominance of the Big 12 has abruptly ceased to exist.
Every program will go through a lull every now and then, but for OU, the lull has extended into a fifth season. The fact that this period of struggle and difficulty persists in Norman is reinforcing what we continue to see — and saw on Saturday against Texas: The Oklahoma program has become stale.
Bob Stoops is a legend. He will be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame one day, and rightly so. His first 12 seasons at the University of Oklahoma deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as any other great collection of 12 seasons at one school. Stoops is the main reason why the team he lost to on Saturday — Texas — has somehow won only three Big 12 titles, one of them being the wildly improbable 1996 crown forged by John Mackovic’s team against Tom Osborne and Nebraska.
We spoke earlier about the imperfections of human beings. Part of our world of imperfection is that for many of us, we begin to decline after many years of success. Few in the coaching business are able to be legitimately great (not good — GREAT) for 12 years, but among those who pull off the feat, it’s hard to continue to excel with relentless regularity. Frank Beamer has realized this at Virginia Tech, and he’s hardly alone.
What’s happening at OU — and has happened for most of the past five years (the 2013 season and Sugar Bowl win over Alabama rating as an exception) — is not so much an indictment of Stoops as it is merely a reflection of the stagnation which exists in Norman. The Sooners keep entering seasons hoping they’ve regained a top-tier identity, but in the middle of October, these seasons — 2015 being the latest one — continue to lose a measure of hope.
Much will be said about Charlie Strong’s ability to douse the flames of speculation surrounding his job status in Austin. However, after another Texas upset of Oklahoma as a double-digit dog, it’s worth considering how much longer the Sooners can afford to drift along in their present state… which is not very intimidating or effort-filled at all.