Instant Analysis: Oklahoma-Oklahoma State

One very long month ago, the Oklahoma Sooners were found flailing and floundering in Columbia, Missouri. The Crimson and Cream, who were shaky even in September, had not ironed out their problems or addressed their deficiencies. Landry Jones – a man whom OU blogger Allen Kinney has called “the Les Miles of quarterbacks,” a very apt description – proved to be utterly unreliable away from his home base in Norman. Coordinator Brent Venables watched in horror as his 11-man gang got blown away in the second half by Missouri’s offensive front. The Sooners were frail and flimsy, and when they lost another road game at Texas A&M early in November, this proud program felt itself clinging to nothing more than a thin rail of hope on the edge of Big 12 South title contention. The calls and cries were loud and familiar: “Big Game Bob has lost it; he’s no longer worthy of the name.”


Actually, Bob Stoops’s credentials and quality have been under fire for some time now. The cutthroat nature of the BCS system and the corrosive, negative attitudes it perpetuates have led the general public to regard Stoops as something of an underachiever. Losing in BCS bowls has come to be seen as a sin whose dimensions greatly exceed the virtues of winning a division or conference championship. Failures in January have led a considerable segment of the college football community to regard Stoops as something less than superb from January through November. This is at once both easy to understand and impossible to fathom. Of course one is aware of the reasons for such attitudes, but on a purely rational level, they make no sense. At any rate, those very same attitudes existed heading into Saturday night’s latest parade of wackiness known as the Bedlam Series. Two years after a 61-41 win on a late-November Saturday night in Stillwater, the OU crew did the deed again by a 47-41 score (slackers!).


How did Oklahoma pull through? Jones made several horrible decisions and throws in the first two and a half quarters, but he mastered the moment and torched Oklahoma State’s secondary for two home-run touchdowns that put his team in the win column. On the other side of the ball, it’s true that Oklahoma State did score 41 points, but the Cowboys notched only 27 of those points on offense (seven came on defense and seven more on special teams, with still more points being set up by OU miscues). Venables wasn’t vexed by OSU offensive coordinator Dana Holgorsen; the Cowboys involved their running backs a lot more on their first drive after halftime to score a touchdown on the Sooners’ defense, but after that march, the Pokes’ only other offensive touchdown came when OU played a prevent defense as the owner of a two-score lead with under five minutes left in regulation. The Sooners’ road-game credentials didn’t deserve to be trusted just because of one good game against Baylor, but in Boone Pickens Stadium, Bob Stoops had his team ready to play at its best.


And so, the narrative is a familiar one – not just in a Bedlam battle routinely won by the Sooners, but in the Big 12 South as a whole. Stoops arrived in Norman in 1999 and has now completed 12 seasons in the division. With a virtually-assured advantage in the forthcoming BCS standings, OU should win a three-team tiebreaker with Texas A&M and Oklahoma State, thereby earning the distinction of division champion for yet another year. When the matter becomes official on Sunday night, Stoops will claim his eighth division title in the past 11 seasons, thereby giving him a chance to snag a seventh Big 12 crown since he was brought aboard to lift Oklahoma out of its 1990s doldrums.


On the same day that North Carolina State coach Tom O’Brien failed – again – to win a division championship, Stoops reaffirmed his own ability to close the door, to steer his team to the winner’s circle. Pete Carroll is no longer around in the college game, but two other men matched the former USC coach in terms of owning their conferences with remarkable annual consistency. One of those men achieved a piece of the Big Ten title on Saturday: Jim Tressel of Ohio State. The other man is none other than Bob Stoops. All the man does is win. Moreover, he wins after enduring thick clouds of adversity in the earlier stages of a season. Oklahoma lost to Oregon and Texas in 2006 yet climbed the mountain and won at Oklahoma State to nail down the Big 12 South. OU lost to Texas in 2008 but never relented in its attempt to gain higher ground. The Sooners won at Oklahoma State to win the South yet again.


Now, here we are in 2010. Two ugly road losses have been overcome. Two months of growing pains were transformed into lasting lessons that bore fruit in the chill of late November. Bob Stoops is a division champion, and he’ll contest the final Big 12 title tilt against OU’s classic rival, the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Gee – seems like old times.


Big Game Bob has lost it? When? When did that ever happen? There’s another conference championship waiting to be decided, and once again, five Big 12 South schools will watch Oklahoma take the field against a Big 12 North foe. Seems as though Stoops knows exactly what he’s doing… and that he hasn’t lost the mustard on his coaching fastball by any stretch.