Oklahoma football: Why OU’s season hopes ride with the number “1”
By Chip Rouse
When you look at what is left on the Oklahoma football schedule this season, the numeral one takes on increasing importance.
Although every season starts out with the goal of winning every game, the reality is, unless you are one of the truly elite teams — and even if you are — the odds of going undefeated through 12 or more college football games are heavily stacked against you.
To show you how rare it is, Oklahoma has gone undefeated and untied for a full football season just 11 times in its storied 125-year history. And in three of those years, prior to 1900, an entire season consisted of just two games.
It has been 19 years since the last Sooner team registered a perfect season: the 13-0 2000 national championship team.
As Oklahoma has proven on a number of occasions over the past 19 seasons — covering both the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) and the College Football Playoff eras — a single regular-season loss does not eliminate you from national championship contention. Twice in the BCS era (2003 and 2008), the Sooners played in the national championship game with one loss, and all three times they have been one of the four teams to make the College Football Playoff they have done so with one loss.
What a midseason loss does do, however, is leave virtually no margin for error and places a premium on the remaining games on the regular-season schedule. Oklahoma is going to have to win all four of its games in November to guarantee a spot in the Big 12 Championship, and the Sooners would still have to prevail in the conference championship game to have any chance at all of making this year’s Playoff.
A tall order, at best, but not impossible — as long as the Sooners can rebound in a big way from last weekend’s shocking defeat and run the table over the next five games.
It’s been 1,140 days since Oklahoma last lost for a second time in the regular season (45-24 to Ohio State in the third game of the 2016 season).
Oklahoma losses aren’t the same as at other schools
Oklahoma losses are viewed differently than they are in most other places in the world of big-time college football. In his weekly press conference on Tuesday, Lincoln Riley told reporters in attendance, including columnists Jenni Carlson and Berry Tramel of The (Oklahoma City) Oklahoman, what former head coach Bob Stoops had related to him after Saturday’s game:
"“Every loss at Oklahoma is shocking.”"
That’s because Oklahoma is favored in practically every game it plays. The Sooners were 23.5-point favorites to win at K-State.
"“Games like that (K-State), they either rip you apart or bring you closer together,” Riley said in his opening remarks in Tuesday’s press conference. “A lot of times, there’s no middle ground.“It’s one of those deals where everyone — players, coaches, everyone involved — has got to look in the mirror and ask, ‘What do I need to do better for this team for it to play at its elite level?'”"
Riley, his coaches and the OU players are crystal clear on what they have to do from here. There is a big difference, though, between knowing and doing. We’ll see in the coming weeks exactly what this Sooner team is made of and how they are able to learn and grow from adversity.
Think of the K-State loss as a giant wake-up call
In an interview with Oklahoman staff writer Abby Bitterman, former OU defensive back Will Johnson (2015-17), compared the loss to Kansas State to the 2017 Oklahoma loss at home to Iowa State, handing the Sooners their first loss of the season.
“It just kind of showed us that even a team that’s not as good as you could hang around with you,” Johnson said, “or better yet beat you if you’re not on your game.”
Losing can serve as a wake-up call, or it can evolve further into a nightmare if you’re not willing or able to learn from and make physical and schematic corrections to the areas that caused you to lose. But that’s not all. It also takes a mental adjustment.
You have to have a “healthy respect for what it takes to win and what it takes to play at your best,” Riley said.
“It kind of puts you on edge every game,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t allow you to sleep on anyone. It shows you how hard winning is.
After a loss, it also brings you more together as a unit, he said, because of all the people who start to root against you.
While the Sooners will be doing everything in their power in the month of November to not allow the number one to become two in the loss column, they also will be pinning their hopes, in large part, on another numeral one, as in the jersey number of quarterback Jalen Hurts.
Since 2014, OU is 17-0 in month of November
Recent history has been highly favorable to the Sooners in November. The last time Oklahoma lost a game in November was in 2014 (48-14 to Baylor).
Hurts, who knows a thing or two about playing in championship games, having played in three consecutive national championships with Alabama, is the present engineer at the controls of the powerful Oklahoma offensive locomotive that has led the nation each of the past three seasons.
Hurts may be No. 1 figure as Oklahoma heads back out on its road through the remainder of the 2019 season, but it’s going to take a complete team effort in all aspects of the game — much like they’ve shown in similar circumstances in the past — if the Sooners are going to replicate history and arrive at a similar end result.
must have a healthy respect for what it takes to win and what it takes to play at your best