Oklahoma football: Riley can look to Stoops in learning how to close

Oklahoma football often flirted with disaster last season, allowing teams to hang around and get back into games rather than showing the killer instinct needed to be a championship football team.

There was enough magic and enough Baker Mayfield to get around it through most of the year, but it eventually cost them a shot at a championship. If the storyline of a first-year head coach learning how to finish football games sounds familiar to Sooner fans, it’s because they went through the same thing in 1999 with Bob Stoops.

Last year Lincoln Riley put together one of the best first seasons of any coach in college football history. He set the Sooners’ program win record with 12 victories in his inaugural campaign and had Oklahoma heartbreakingly close to playing for a national championship game.

Yet year two can be even better. And it starts with Riley.

While many will point to Mike Stoops and the inconsistency of the Sooners defense a year ago (and justifiably so), there were plenty of growing pains for Riley as a game manager that can be addressed going forward.

Riley looked like a veteran when he took his team into Columbus and knocked off Ohio State. He outcoached Urban Myer at every turn and had his team focused and ready to play a physical, disciplined game in a hostile environment, but what happened in the weeks that followed made Riley look like a young coach still learning on the job.

After dismantling a clearly-inferior Tulane team, Oklahoma blew an 18-point lead and nearly squandered a 15-point advantage in a too-close-for-comfort 49-41 win over winless Baylor.

A week later it happened again, but with greater consequence against Iowa State. The Sooners led 17-3 and 24-10 in the first half, but the scrappy Cyclonse clawed their way back into the game and pulled off a 38-31 win that would eventually cost the Sooners the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff.

Yes, Oklahoma would go on to reel off seven straight wins after that, but the Sooners still struggled to throw the knockout punch when they had opponents on the ropes.

They led 20-0 against Texas and appeared to be on the verge of a emptying out half the Cotton Bowl by halftime, but mistakes piled up and allowed Texas to take a late lead in the fourth quarter. Luckily for the Sooners, Mayfield and Andrews were able to connect on a touchdown pass that will live on in the rivalry’s lore forever to pull off the comeback victory.

The next week Oklahoma started flat against Kansas State in Manhattan – something one might blame on a post-Texas hangover – but it wasn’t the slow start that should concern Sooner fans. Oklahoma was able to get up off the mat, erase a 21-7 deficit to take a pair of second half leads, but once again rather than the delivering the right hook that would have knocked out the Wildcats, the Sooners allowed Bill Snyder’s team to fight its way out of the corner and tie the game on each occasion. It took a super human effort from Rodney Anderson to finally put Oklahoma up for good  in the game’s final minute.

It looked like Oklahoma had figured things out over the next few weeks. They built big first half leads and played keep away against Texas Tech, TCU, Kansas and West Virginia, then delivered their most complete team performance in the Big 12 Championship game in a 41-17 blowout victory over TCU.

Then an old problem came back at the worst time possible. The Sooners led Georgia by 17 points in the closing minutes of the first half and appeared to be on the verge of a fifth-straight win over an SEC opponent, but we all know the heartbreaking story of how that ended.

Many people have tried to spin the narrative that Georgia dominated the second half of that game, but that’s only partially true at best. Oklahoma, down by seven points in the fourth quarter, scored back-to-back touchdowns in the span of less than two minutes to take a seven-point lead down the stretch. Unfortunately unlike Kansas State, Baylor and Texas, Georgia was able to respond and tie the game up and eventually win it in double overtime.

To put it plainly, Oklahoma needs to learn how to finish in 2018. The national title, like coffee is for closers.

None of this makes Lincoln Riley a bad head coach or game manager. It just means he was an inexperienced at both. And he’s in good company when it comes to this. His predecessor Bob Stoops had the same problem in his inaugural season in Norman.