Oklahoma football: The definitive guide to Alex Grinch

The future of Oklahoma football became a little brighter with the official announcement that Alex Grinch will assume the helm of the OU defense as the Sooners new defensive coordinator.

Any time a hire like this is made at a marquee school like Oklahoma it is going to come with questions. Who is Alex Grinch? How does he fit in at Oklahoma? What can we expect to change?

We are going to break down everything we know about the newest Oklahoma defensive coordinator, looking at the good and the bad. For every good quality about Grinch, we’ll splice in one that might not be so good.

Good: He’s an immediate improvement

The 2018 Sooners defense was the equivalent of a smoking engine in the middle of the desert. Everyone knew things weren’t good, they were just trying to get enough patches on it to get to a filling station and make some fixes.

Things fell apart for Oklahoma midway through the year and after a slight improvement immediately following the firing of Mike Stoops, the wheels finally came off under Ruffin McNeil as things got historically bad for the Sooners. It was the culmination of the worst three-year statistical stretch of all time for OU, and yes, that includes the dark John Blake seasons of which we try not to speak.

Grinch will bring an identity to the Sooners and a vision for a team in sore need of one. For both good and bad he’ll be where the buck stops for the Sooner defense, freeing Riley to concentrate on gameplanning and continuing to engineer historically-great offenses.