Oklahoma football: Disaster lives inside Sooners 20-yard line
By Chip Rouse
The last thing you want if you’re blessed with the best offensive coach on the planet and a championship-caliber, multi-weapon Oklahoma football offense is to see your defense helplessly on it heels and giving up long, time-consuming drives — most resulting in points — keeping your own monster points machine watching powerless on the sidelines.
That is pretty much the Oklahoma story the past two seasons, both of which the Sooners fell one game short of a shot at the national championship.
Lincoln Riley and the Sooners’ new defensive coordinator Alex Grinch are optimistic that by being quicker to the ball and more aggressive on defense, Oklahoma will be able to create more third-down stops and, ideally, more third-and-long situations that will allow the defense to get off the field and exchange places with an offense that takes a backseat to no other team in the country.
Ironically, bend-but-don’t-break college defenses generally play to the advantage of the defensive unit. The idea behind this theory is that the more plays an offense runs in a particular drive, the greater chance it has of making a mistake on which the defense can capitalize.
It’s also been theorized that the closer a team on offense moves the ball toward the opponent’s goal line — as in inside the red zone, which is the 20 yards of real estate between the 20-yard line and the defensive team’s goal line — the more difficult it is for the offensive team to score because the amount of the field to defend is greatly reduced.
Neither of those defensive philosophies worked out very well for the Sooners last season.
While the Oklahoma offense led the nation in scoring a year ago — and it’s a good thing it did — averaging close to 50 points a game, the Sooners ranked 101st (out of 129 FBS teams) in scoring defense, yielding an average of 33 points a game. In four consecutive games to end the regular season, all Oklahoma victories, each of OU’s opponents scored 40 or more points.
The Sooners were extremely fortunate. The hard cold truth is you aren’t going to win many games when you allow your opponent to score at least 40 points.
The best way for a defense to stop offensive momentum is to force a turnover. The Sooners were among the nation’s worst in creating takeaways last season. Only nine FBS teams (again out of 129) were credited with fewer takeaways than Oklahoma’s 11 a year ago. Interestingly, the last two places Grinch coached the defense, at Washington State for three seasons and Ohio State last season, the teams both ranked in the top 30 in the country in forcing and recovering turnovers.
This is something that Grinch is determined to change at Oklahoma.
Grinch has long been a staunch proponent of the defensive philosophy that takeaways equate to victories. It’s the only reason a (defense) is out there:
"“It’s the only reason a (defense) is out there,” To get the ball back for the offense,” Grinch told ESPN.com several years ago and cited again in an article by Jason Kersey of The Athletic earlier this year."
“A lot of people don’t think like that,” he said. They look at it more that you’re trying to limit yards But you’re there on defense for one reason, to get the ball back.”
That is not the end all, be all of Oklahoma’s defensive woes, but it clearly is an area in which the Sooners can make significant improvement.
Another defensive breakdown that stood out like an accident waiting to happen last season was the Sooners’ chronic inability to keep their opponents out of the end zone once they moved the ball within 20 yards of the OU goal line. Only three out of 129 FBS teams a year ago performed worse than Oklahoma in defending the red zone.
Breaking that down into numbers, in a total of 54 red-zone defensive opportunities by the Sooners last season, the opponent came away with points. That’s a failure rate of 93 percent. And what’s worse, all but five, or 49, of those red-zone stands ended up in touchdowns. That level of performance is unsustainable for a team with any kind of championship aspirations, let alone a national title.
Suffice to say, Grinch has his work cut out for him in his effort to return a level of respectability to an Oklahoma defense that has totally lost its way and fallen to the bottom of the barrel in recent seasons. As elite as the Sooner offense is, however, even the slightest defensive improvement should make a significant difference in the ability of any team on the 2019 schedule to hang with the high-powered Sooner scoring machine.
A 10-point difference in scoring defense a year ago could easily have resulted in an eighth Oklahoma national championship. The good news is that is a reasonable and realistic goal for the Sooner defense in 2019.