Oklahoma football: Notable numbers from from a Red River true shootout
By Chip Rouse
Remember when Oklahoma football won games and national championships with its outstanding defense? Now the Sooners are allowing almost as many points as their high-scoring, top-10-ranked offense.
That’s not a sustainable trend for a team that claims to be able to compete with and beat the best in the game, let alone win a conference championship. Anyone who know anything at all about the game of football knows that is not a ratio that contributes to victories.
When you score 45 points in a game, as the Sooners did on Saturday in their Red River Showdown with Texas, you expect to win. If that doesn’t happen, the blame almost always goes to a defense that is badly leaking oil. For the first time in six games this season, the Oklahoma offense was outscored, and the defense bears the biggest share of the blame…but not all of it.
Quarterback Kyler Murray, who has been sensational in every game as the Sooner starter this season, and almost miraculously led OU back from life support on Saturday, committed two costly mistakes that definitively affected the outcome of the game. Murray’s third interception of the season in the second quarter led to a 44-yard Texas field goal that put the Longhorns out front 10-7.
Then, after the Sooner defense had delivered only its second three-and-out of the game, and Oklahoma trailing the Longhorns by just seven points, 31-24, Murray lost control of the ball on first down and the loose ball was recovered by Texas. The Longhorns scored in five plays, and added another touchdown six minutes later, to go ahead by what at the time appeared to be an almost insurmountable three touchdowns, 45-24.
We all know what happened after that, but the bottom line was that the Sooners dug themselves too deep a hole because of shoddy, shameful defense. This game was all but over when Texas scored its third touchdown in the third quarter to go ahead by three scores.
The 48 points scored by the Longhorns is the most they’ve scored this season (37 was the previous high in a 37-14 win over USC) and the most ever in 113 meetings against the archrival Sooners.
Here are a dozen more numbers of interest from Saturday’s Red River Showdown game:
1:29 — The amount of time (in minutes and seconds) Oklahoma had trailed all season before Texas kicked a field goal in the first quarter of Saturday’s Red River Showdown to take a 10-7 lead.
2 — Combined third down plays faced by either team in the third quarter.
5 — Four of the last five games between Oklahoma and Texas have been decided by five or fewer points.
Oklahoma Sooners Football
9 — Oklahoma placekicker Austin Seibert accounted for nine total points in Saturday’s Red River rivalry game (1 field goal and 6 extra points). That gives him 414 points in his career and moved him into 14th place on the NCAA career scoring list.
9.2 — Yards per play by the Oklahoma offense in a losing cause versus Texas on Saturday, compared with 6.7 yards per play by the Longhorns.
21 — OU’s point total in the fourth quarter, the most points scored in the final quarter versus Texas since 1952.
24-17 — Outscoring teams by the combined score of 136-40 in the first half through the first five games, Oklahoma found itself trailing 24-17 at the half on Saturday, the first time the Sooners have trailed at halftime all season.
25 — Texas recorded seven tackles for loss. Combined with seven incomplete passes thrown by Kyler Murray, that means that 25 percent of the Sooner’s total 58 plays in the game failed to gain yardage.
67 — Kyler Murray’s 67-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter was the longest TD run by an Oklahoma quarterback in this series since Jack Mitchell ran 72 yards for a score in 1947.
77 — The 77-yard touchdown pass from Kyler Murray to Marquise “Hollywood” Brown in the second quarter was the longest OU pass play for a TD against Texas in the history of the rivalry.
98 — Combined points scored by OU and Texas in Saturday’s game, a new all-time scoring record in the history of the rivalry. The previous record was 95 points in 2016 (OU 45, Texas 40).
179-78 — Yards by which OU outgained Texas in the fourth quarter, during which time the Sooners scored 21 points in just under five minutes total time of possession.