Oklahoma football: Red-zone defense a real problem that needs fixing

It’s no secret that the Oklahoma football offense is among the best in the nation.

While outscoring your opponent is the very nature of the game, it is only a winning formula when you have a defense that is able to prevent the other team from scoring as many points as your offense is able to put on the scoreboard.

The Sooners win a lot of games because of their scoring proficiency once they advance the ball inside the opponent’s 20-yard line, which in football is commonly known as the red zone. Behind quarterback Jalen Hurts a year ago, Oklahoma was 13th in the country in that category, converting 92 percent of its 73 red-zone scoring opportunities, 52 of them resulting in touchdowns.

As successful as the Sooners were, however, in scoring once the offense was in possession of the ball inside the red zone, they were dreadful in getting defensive stops in the red zone.

Oklahoma’s opponents last season reached the red zone 48 times against the Sooner defense, and the defense yielded points on 45 of those possessions. Thirty-two of this possesions ended up as touchdowns and 15 as field goals.

The point is that 94 percent of the time an OU opponent reached the red zone in 2019 it came away with points, and on several occasions that came perilously close to costing the Sooners the ball game.

To put that number into painful perspective. 128 FBS teams (out of 130) had a better red-zone defensive percentage than Oklahoma did last season, and all but one Big 12 team was better in that department than the conference champion Sooners.

Oklahoma football is an offensive machine, but a red-zone sieve.

While the much-maligned OU defense made marked improvement in Alex Grinch’s first season as defensive coordinator in 2019, going from 114th in the nation in total defense the season before he arrived to 38th last season, the team’s red-zone defense remained just as inept as before–  actually declining, from 126th among FBS teams in 2018 to 128th last season.

Grinch seems to be making appreciable advances in other areas of the defensive unit, as the players become more familiar with his system and he starts to recruit the right players for his defense.  But the team’s failure to stop scoring opportunities in the red zone remains a real problem, and candidly is not sustainable if the Sooners are to continue their championship ways under head coach Lincoln Riley.

Oklahoma recent string of success has been predicated on its offensive strength and the ability to outscore virtually everybody. The truth is, however, Riley’s guys are allowing their opponents to put up big numbers on the scoreboard against them. The Sooners’ 12 wins last season is obviously impressive, but consider that four of those victories were by seven or fewer points, and three were by four or less points.

What turned out as a 12-2 record could just as easily been 8-6. And at Oklahoma that is considered a losing season.

Until the Sooners address their problems defensively in the red zone, they have little, if any, chance of getting past the first game in the College Football Playoff, let alone continuing to reach the Playoff.