Oklahoma-Texas: Telling Stats in this Weekend’s Border Brawl
By Chip Rouse
The Las Vegas handicappers have established the school from the northern side of the Red River as the favorite in the annual Oklahoma-Texas border war on Saturday in Dallas for a seventh straight year.
The 20th-ranked Sooners are a 10-point favorite. They were 17-point favorites a year ago also, but that game ended in a victory for the underdog Longhorns, who downed Oklahoma 24-17 in a game that really wasn’t that close.
The point is, as anyone who has followed the Oklahoma-Texas football rivalry can readily tell you, being the favorite in the Red River rivalry isn’t something you take to the bank. Unpredictability is the rule of thumb in this 110-year-old rivalry series.
In fact, more times than not, it seems, the team that is favored in this game ends up on the short end of the final score.
ESPN’s Football Power Index, which has Oklahoma at No. 11 this week and the Longhorns at 37th, with every Big 12 team not named Iowa State or Kansas in front of them.
It is very rare in this popular rivalry series that one or both teams is not ranked. In 89 percent of the 110 football games played between Oklahoma and Texas at least one of the two teams has been ranked in the nation’s top 25.
In the last three years of the Red River Showdown, Oklahoma has come into the game as the only ranked team, as is the situation again this year. The unranked Longhorns won two of the past three games against a top-25-ranked Sooners’ team.
The first time it happens, perhaps you could think of it as an aberration. When it occurs twice, perhaps Lady Luck has intervened. But after six times? That’s a pattern and something that should be deeply concerning to Sooner fans. Because that is the number of times Texas has beaten Oklahoma the past eight times the Longhorns have come into their rivalry game with the Sooners as the lone unranked team.
Three other numbers that could have a big say in the outcome of this year’s Red River Showdown are 9.2, 20 and 55.
The Texas defense is allowing 9.2 yards every time an opponent puts the ball in the air.
Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield has completed 68 percent of his pass attempts through four game for 1,067 yards and an average of 13.2 yards per completion. Moreover, Mayfield is completing 55 percent of his passes thrown at least 20 yards. The latter is the second-best percentage in the country over that distance.
For all its unpredictability, the one thing that is predictable about every Red River Shootout is that one team is going to be over-the-top with excitement and the other wildly disappointed. That much is crystal clear.