Oklahoma football: Defense was the difference-maker at West Virginia
By Chip Rouse
You wouldn’t know it from looking at the box score, but it was a couple of game-changing defensive plays that were the defining difference in the Oklahoma football victory Friday night over West Virginia.
Kyler Murray and the Sooner offense were unstoppable, as always, but that wouldn’t have been enough to win the game and earn the top seed in this weekend’s Big 12 Championship were it not for two critical turnovers created by the highly criticized Oklahoma defense.
The Sooner defense, which has been among the worst in college football at the FBS level this season and very much out of character for a championship caliber team like Oklahoma, has only forced five fumbles all season, and two of those came on Friday night at West Virginia in what amounted to a Big 12 Championship elimination game.
With just a little over three minutes remaining before halftime and the Sooners leading 28-21 after a 68-yard touchdown run by Kennedy Brooks, OU linebacker Caleb Kelly came crashing off the edge and sacked West Virginia QB Will Grier, who lost the ball when Kelly hit him from behind at the West Virginia 12-yard line. Kelly scooped up the loose ball at the 10-yard line and ran it in for a Sooner touchdown, and in a matter of 30 seconds Oklahoma had broken a 21-all tie and gone ahead by 14 points.
Four minutes into the fourth quarter, with Oklahoma leading 52-49 and West Virginia driving and inside Sooner territory, Kenneth Mann and Curtis Bolton combined for perhaps the defensive play of the game and what turned out to be the winning margin. Mann sacked Grier at the OU 48-yard line, forcing a fumble, which was recovered by Bolton and returned for a touchdown. It was the first sack of the season for Mann and the third defensive touchdown of the season by Bolton, two of them coming on blocked punts.
“When you score two touchdowns defensively, you like your chances.” — OU head coach Lincoln Riley in his postgame comments after the win over West Virginia
In the words of an Associated Press writer covering the game: “The Sooners were unremarkable on defense yet again, but those two stellar (defensive) plays were the difference.”
The Oklahoma defense gave up a season-high 704 yards to the Big 12’s second-best offensive team. But it is safe to say that without creating and capitalizing on the two costly West Virginia turnovers, the outcome of this came might have been much different.
It is poetic justice that in a season of few ups and mostly downs for the defensive side of the ball, the Sooners came up with two of the biggest defensive plays of the season in their biggest conference game of the season.
As a result, the three-time defending Big 12 champions will get the chance to make it four consecutive Big 12 titles, and 12 overall, on Saturday when Oklahoma and Texas go at each other in a highly anticipated rematch. The Longhorns (9-3) are the team responsible for Oklahoma’s only loss this season.