Oklahoma football: Sooners can’t afford to look beyond Baylor to Texas

A quick glimpse at the Big 12 power structure as a whole would indicate the Oklahoma football task this weekend in hosting Baylor is less daunting than what lies dead ahead over the next several weeks on the schedule.

Given the fact that the Sooners have owned the all-time series with Baylor, and especially their 12-1 domination when these two teams have played in Norman, it would be easy to drop your guard and look beyond the Baylor Bears with eyes of Oklahoma focused squarely on the annual showdown with Texas the week following.

All things being equal, that is not an unreasonable scenario to be concerned with if you are a Sooner fan. Only in this case all things are not equal. The heart-tugging scare Oklahoma received from a highly disciplined and well prepared, yet unranked and non-Power Five opponent, in Army served as a fortuitous wake-up call.

What happened last week against Army is the only motivation the Sooners players should need to prevent them from taking Baylor, or any of the eight remaining teams on the 2018 schedule lightly.

I don’t, for a minute, believe that the Oklahoma coaches or players took Army for granted, despite what Las Vegas and other college football experts were predicting would be a runaway Sooner victory. The Sooners were simply outplayed and outcoached by a team that honestly believed it was good enough to beat a top-10 team on that team’s home field. And to be perfectly candid, Army was good enough last weekend to have taken down mighty Oklahoma.

The more talented team did manage to win last weekend in Norman, but that’s not to say that same close call couldn’t happen again, only to result in a different outcome.

You can be assured that the OU coaches have and will continue to use the Army game as a teaching opportunity. And it couldn’t have happened at a better time, four games into the 2018 season, with a Baylor team, picked to finish next to last in the conference in the Big 12 Preseason Media Poll, coming to town.

Oklahoma Sooners Football

Seven days from Saturday is a circled date on the calendar every Oklahoma football season. The Oklahoma-Texas game is arguably the most important game on the Sooners schedule every season, but that is especially true this year. Texas is playing very well right now, and for the first time since 2012 both the Sooners and Longhorns are likely to enter the game as top-25 teams.

So it easy to see how Oklahoma could be caught looking ahead a little bit, not just to Texas but to a trip to TCU that follows two weeks after the Red River Showdown, two games that easily pose greater challenges to the Sooners’ championship hopes than the contest on Saturday against Baylor.

Oklahoma has won 24 of the 27 games in the all-time series between the Sooners and Baylor. And at what time, OU was 20-0 in games against Baylor. That is a somewhat misleading statistic, however, when you consider that OU is just 4-3 in the last seven games between the two teams. On top of that, Baylor’s 48-14 win over the Sooners in Norman was one of the worst home losses in Oklahoma football history.

The Sooners have one the last three games in the series and scored over 40 points in each of the games. But the Bears have averaged 33 points in the three losses, which underscores the difficulties the OU defensive unit has had the past few years. Oklahoma won last season’s game at Baylor, 49-41, behind Baker Mayfield, but the game was not decided until very late, and Baylor actually led the Sooners 35-31 going into the final quarter.

The Baylor game on Saturday may not be the most important game on the Oklahoma football schedule this season, but it is an important game nonetheless. The Sooners must show up, however, as if it is the most important game of the season, just as they should every time out for the remainder of the season.