Bob Stoops Has Sooners Fired Up and Playing with an Edge This Season

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Bob Stoops’ Oklahoma Sooners have shown It before. It can be as subtle as a single word in the preceding sentence, but It is not something that football opponents of the Sooners should discount or dismiss as irrelevant.

Once might be a coincidence. But twice, thrice and perhaps now a fourth time is a pattern and something to be taken seriously. Three different times since Bob Stoops has been at Oklahoma, the Sooners have followed up a season in which they failed to reach more than eight wins with no fewer than 11 wins the next year.

In 1999, Stoops’ first season at OU and in his first head-coaching assignment, Oklahoma went 7-5, a two game-improvement over the season before, when the Sooners were 5-6 under John Blake. In Stoops’ second OU season, however, the Sooners went a perfect 13-0 and won Oklahoma’s seventh national crown.

Sep 12, 2015; Knoxville, TN, USA; Oklahoma Sooners wide receiver Sterling Shepard (3) scores the winning touchdown in double overtime against the Tennessee Volunteers at Neyland Stadium. Oklahoma won in double overtime 31-24. Mandatory Credit: Randy Sartin-USA TODAY Sports

Similarly, Oklahoma was 8-4 in 2005, and followed that with an 11-3 season in 2006. The Sooners experienced another down season three years afterward, in 2009, only to rebound to 12-2 the next season.

Moreover, in each of those follow-up seasons, Oklahoma won the Big 12 championship.

So here we are, again, in 2015. OU football is coming off a highly disappointing 8-5 season by Sooner standards, and one in which Oklahoma was hammered not once, but twice by 34 points, the first time in Stoops’ 16 seasons in Norman that his teams had suffered two losses in the same season by such wide a margin.

Throughout the offseason, there has been media criticism and fan talk questioning if Stoops’ stay at Oklahoma was nearing an end and whether he had lost the fire and the will to keep up what it takes to keep getting better and sustain a top program year after year in college football.

The 2015 preseason polls and college preview publications sure didn’t give the Sooners much love or expectations that this season result in a dramatic improvement over what OU went through a year ago. Throughout the past 16 seasons, Oklahoma and archrival Texas have alternated as the preseason choice of the Big 12 coaches to win the conference championship.

Sep 12, 2015; Knoxville, TN, USA; Oklahoma Sooners head coach Bob Stoops celebrates with safety Steven Parker (10) after defeating the Tennessee Volunteers in double overtime at Neyland Stadium. Oklahoma won 31-24. Mandatory Credit: Jim Brown-USA TODAY Sports

Coming into this season, two Big 12 teams are ranked in the top-five nationally, and neither is OU or Texas. TCU and Baylor are expected to battle for the conference championship and a potential spot in the College Football Playoff. Oklahoma is still considered a top-25 team, but not in the same class as TCU or Baylor.

College football author, analyst, radio talk-show host and SEC football propagandist Paul Finebaum even went so far as to label Bob Stoops and the Sooners as “irrelevant” before the game last weekend at Tennessee.

Needless to say, all of this has the Sooners’ fighting mad and wanting to prove all of the naysayers wrong this season.

Some might say Oklahoma has the college football world and all of those who have counted out the Sooners for this season exactly where they want them. Under Stoops, OU seems to play its best when everyone else has written them off as has-beens.

The Sooners certainly made a statement to this effect in their dramatic come-from-behind victory over Tennessee on Saturday. For a half in that game, Oklahoma looked overmatched and slightly out of sync, largely due to the overwhelming effect of 102,000 loud, passionate fans mostly dressed in the orange and white colors of the home team.

“This is a different Oklahoma, a feistier, more resilient Oklahoma, an Oklahoma that takes it personally that it has been relegated to second-class status.” —Chris Lowe, ESPN.com staff writer

But that all changed in the second half. The OU defense tightened down the screws after the opening Tennessee drive (45 yards) of the second half. From that point forward the Sooners yielded less than 50 yards total the rest of the game, including the two overtimes.

The Sooner offense finally got its engine started in the fourth quarter, and once it did there was no stopping the Sooner avalanche. Behind quarterback Baker Mayfield and several highlight-reel pass receptions by senior Sooner Superman Sterling Shepard, tied the game with 14 unanswered fourth-quarter points and then took control in the second overtime.

Oklahoma showed a grittiness and resilience in the win over Tennessee that was missing much of last season and is not something you typically see with or for a coach who might be on his way out of a job.

“This is a different Oklahoma, a feistier, more resilient Oklahoma and an Oklahoma that takes it personally that it has been relegated to second-class status in the new world order of the Big 12,” writes ESPN senior staff writer Chris Lowe.

Oklahoma’s All-Big 12 First Team linebacker Eric Striker, the Energizer bunny of the OU defense, says the Sooners couldn’t wait to get the 2015 season underway.

“We were embarrassed last year,” Striker told reporters in the postgame press conference after the Sooners’ improbable victory over 23rd-ranked Tennessee.

“We didn’t like the way we finished last year. We’re doing everything as leaders and players to bring change around here. You’ve got to be p—– off every game, every time you step up on that field.”

Bob Stoops was asked at his regular Monday press conference about Finebaum’s comments on an ESPN college football preview show last weekend (you can click here to go to the page with the video capturing what Paul Finebaum had to say, both before and after, about Stoops and the Sooners). Here is Stoops’ response:

“I don’t care,” the OU head coach shot back. “He (Finebaum) doesn’t deserve that attention from me. The bottom line is, ask Tennessee and their 105,000 people if we’re relevant or not.

“He’s getting paid to promote a league,” Stoops continued. “That’s what he does. That’s OK. Everyone has to earn their money one way or the other.”