Oklahoma football: New DC Alex Grinch has defensive plan in mind
By Chip Rouse
Improving the defense is Job 1 for new Oklahoma football defensive coordinator Alex Grinch.
But Grinch isn’t alone as he takes on his new responsibilities. Defensive improvement is also a primary objective of the Sooners’ head coach and chief offensive architect Lincoln Riley.
It is abundantly clear that since Riley arrived in Norman as Bob Stoops’ offensive coordinator four years ago, the Sooner offense has been one of the best, if not the best, offensive teams in college football. Oklahoma’s explosive offensive capability is the unequivocal reason the Sooners have made it into the College Football Playoff in three of the last four years.
Some college football experts believe if OU had just an average defense, they not only would have reached the national championship game once and perhaps twice in those three Playoff appearances but would have added at least one more piece of championship hardware to its trophy case.
The Oklahoma offense and defensive units have been polar opposites in recent seasons. The painful disparity cost longtime defensive coordinator Mike Stoops his job six games into the 2018 season. While the Oklahoma offense led or ranked in the top five nationally in most offensive categories last season, the defense was among the very worst in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
The Sooners ranked No. 1 in the country in total offense in 2018 (570.3 yards per game) and 114th out of 129 FBS teams in total defense (allowing 453.8 yards and 33 points per game). Despite this extraordinary differential for a team considered one of the best in the country, Oklahoma won 12 games and won its fourth consecutive Big 12 championship.
While the Sooners have performed poorly overall on defense the past several seasons, there were games and situations in which the OU D-unit managed to rise to the occasion and come up with big play, but far too inconsistently over a full season.
Some have attributed the deplorable defensive play to poor coaching, the absence of talented defensive players (which speaks to the inability to recruit top defensive talent), ineffective scheme design and/or badly executed fundamentals. Maybe some of all of this, or maybe not.
Oklahoma Sooners Football
Grinch and Riley are in agreement that what the Sooners need on the defensive side is not so much a total rebuild but rather some remodeling, and it starts with a change of attitude.
Grinch is an adamant believer that the No. 1 purpose of a defense is to get the ball back to the offense. There are multiple ways to go about this, including personnel groupings and scheme design, sure tackling…on and on.
Defensive success is frequently measured by points allowed, yards given up and third-down defensive conversions, but Grinch says turnovers is the measurement factor that matters the most. He want the Sooners to become more aggressive on defense and force more turnovers.
When Grinch was at Washington State, the Cougars went from eight turnovers the year before he got there to 24 in 2015, his first season. WSU went from three total wins in 2014 to nine in 2015. That was with a team a lot less talented offensively than Oklahoma, so it goes to show what a difference a turnover-minded defense can make.
The number of turnovers (fumbles forced and recovered, passes intercepted) created by the Oklahoma defense has gone down dramatically in the last four seasons. OU forced 27 turnovers in 2015, tied for 13th best in the nation. By 2018, however, that number was down to 11, fifth worst among Football Bowl Subdivision teams.
"“Obviously, you want to limit points. You want to contain yards,” Grinch told Oklahoma City Oklahoman columnist Jenni Carlson earlier this year.“But the purpose behind every play in football is for the defense to get the ball back to the offense.”"
Grinch wants the Sooner defensive players to see every play as a chance to get a turnover. He wants to instill the mind set in his defensive unit that everything it does is built on the premise that creating turnovers is the most important thing it can do.
“It gives a singular purpose to every member of your defense on every down as to why we’re out there,” Grinch said.
The Oklahoma administration is betting that Grinch is the right man and has the right stuff to bring defensive football back to relevancy at the University of Oklahoma. They signed him to a $1.4 million contract, the largest ever paid for a coordinator in Sooner football history, according to ESPN staff writer Jake Trotter.
OU football fans are hoping this is just the remedy the doctor ordered to get things turned around for the much-maligned and demoralized Sooner defense.