OU Football: Notable Numbers From Sooners’ Win Over Kansas
By Chip Rouse
Aside from holding a stagnant Kansas offense to 170 total yards, the number six might be the most significant number coming out of the home OU football win Saturday night over the road-challenged Jayhawks.
With their sixth win in the 2016 season, the Sooners became bowl eligible for the 18th consecutive season under head coach Bob Stoops. Of course, Oklahoma has its sights set on doing much more than just becoming bowl eligible.
The Sooners are not definitively out of the running for a spot in the College Football Playoff, although the odds of that happening are extremely low, given their two early-season losses. The winner of the Big 12 this season will get a bid to the Sugar Bowl, one of the New Year’s Six Bowls and a pretty sweet prize for a conference that is expected to be on the outside looking in as far as the College Football Playoff is concerned.
With four games remaining in the regular season, Oklahoma stands alone at the top of the Big 12 with a 5-0 conference record, but with three extremely tough challenges ahead in games with Baylor and Oklahoma State and at West Virginia. The outcome of those contests will likely determine the Big 12 champion.
Oklahoma’s victory over Kansas was the 12th consecutive win by Bob Stoops over the Jayhawks and the 17th consecutive loss by Kansas to a team from the Big 12.
Here are a dozen more notable numbers from the Sooners’ win over the Jayhawks:
1 – Walk-on freshman running back Devin Montgomery ran 10 yards for a touchdown on Saturday on his very first collegiate play.
3 – Points allowed by the OU defense in defeating Kansas. That is the fewest points given up by Oklahoma this season and the fewest since Oct. 17 last season, when the Sooners blanked Kansas State 55-0.
7 – Oklahoma has held Kansas to seven or fewer points in four of the last five games between the two teams.
12 – Consecutive Big 12 regular-season wins, the third longest such streak in OU football history. The record is 17, set between 2003 and 2005.
12 – Touchdown catches by OU wide receiver Mark Andrews out of 39 total receptions this season. He caught one of Baker Mayfield’s four TD passes against Kansas.
15 – Touchdown passes in the past three games by quarterback Baker Mayfield, a new school record. Mayfield had four touchdown passes in two and a half quarters in the win over Kansas.
57 – True freshman Abdul Adams had a 57-yard run against the Jayhawks. It was the second longest run from scrimmage by the Sooners this season.
63 – Touchdown passes by Baker Mayfield in 21 games as an Oklahoma Sooner, the most by any OU quarterback in that length of time.
818 – Yards rushing by Joe Mixon through eight games this season, second best in the Big 12.
1,035 – Receiving yards this season by senior wide receiver Dede Westbrook, who caught five passes for 105 yards against Kansas. Westbrook has gone over 100 yards receiving in each of the past five games. No other Sooner has done that in the same season.
2014 – The last time before Saturday night when Oklahoma scored a touchdown on defense and special teams in the same game. Dede Westbrook returned a punt 71 yards for the Sooners’ first touchdown Saturday night against Kansas. Later in the game, linebacker Jordan Evans intercepted a Kansas pass and returned it 33 yards for another score.
86,301 – The reported attendance Saturday night at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, third largest crowd in the history of that facility, all set this season. All 108 home games in the Bob Stoops coaching era have been sellouts.