Oklahoma football is 5-1 at the halfway mark of the 2018 season, yet some Sooner fans are readying the white flag out of fear the rest of the season is about to go south in a hurry.
“We’ve won at a level that 99.9 percent of the programs out there would kill for,” Sooner head coach Lincoln Riley said to reporters, including Tyler Palmateer of the Norman Transcript, on Monday following the Texas loss.
The standard for Oklahoma football is extremely high — so high, in fact, that one loss becomes a subject of serious concern all across the Sooner Nation, not to mention the rest of the college football universe.
The reality is Oklahoma’s position at this stage of the season is no different than it was last season and in 2015. In 2015, the Sooners suffered a similar unexpected loss to Texas in Game 5, and last season Iowa State pulled off an upset of OU in Norman in the fifth game of the season. Both seasons, the Sooners ran the table in their remaining conference games and claimed the conference crown on their way to the College Football Playoff.
So adversity is nothing new to the Sooners. The precedent is there and all of their season goals are still out there in front of them. They will have dig down a little deeper, take it one game at a time and let everything play out. The most important game the rest of the season is the next one.
If Oklahoma wins out, like it has each of the last three seasons when it has reached this point on the schedule, talk of last week’s debacle in the Cotton Bowl will become a dead subject. That may sound like a tall order, but recent history is on the Sooners’ side.
Here is how we see things for Oklahoma football at halftime of the 2018 season: