With the Red River Showdown game with Texas now in the books for another year, the 2017 Oklahoma football season stands at six down and six to go.
The 29-24 win over their longtime rivals from south of the Red River leaves new head coach Lincoln Riley and the Sooners with a 5-1 record at the midseason mark and with the most difficult portion of their regular-season schedule straight ahead. The second half of the 2017 journey begins Saturday with a tough road test at Kansas State.
Oklahoma has experienced both ends of the emotional spectrum this season, even after just six games. In Week 2, OU went to Columbus, Ohio, to face a college football powerhouse that rarely loses at home. Ohio State was ranked No. 2 in the country and had soundly beaten the Sooners by 21 points in Norman just a year earlier.
We all know what happened in this year’s game at Ohio State. Quarterback Baker Mayfield planted the OU flag in the center of field at Ohio Stadium and the Sooners sent a message to the Big 12 and college football analysts and followers throughout the country that OU was the real deal and as good as ever, even without retired head coach Bob Stoops at the helm.
That was an emotional high that may not be duplicated at any other point this season by the Sooner football team, except perhaps with a win in the Big 12 Championship, which is still too far off to even seriously contemplate at this juncture.
On the other end of the scale, things don’t get much worse in a season filled with great promise than to lose a game at home, a place where you rarely lose, to a team that you are favored to beat by four touchdowns. The Sooners have had that experience this season, as well.
In between those two extremes — the overwhelming joy of victory and the gut-wrenching agony of defeat — Oklahoma has sandwiched a pair of nonconference victories and two conference wins, including the big rivalry win over Texas last weekend.
At the midpoint of the 2017 season, we take a quick look back at what has caught our attention thus far, in full recognition that there is much more to come: