Oklahoma football: Kicker Gabe Brkic earns Big 12 Player of Week honors
By Chip Rouse
On a day when Oklahoma football as a team was not up to typical Sooner standards, kicker Gabe Brkic went above and beyond the call of duty.
The Sooner junior placekicker converted four of five field goals, including three of longer than 50 yards. That performance earned Brkic Big 12 Special Teams Player of the Week. He now has eight field goals of 50 yards or longer. That is twice as many as the next closest Sooner kicker (Tony DiRienzo and Uwe von Schamann each have four).
Brkic connected on field goals of 51, 56 and 55 yards and also was successful on a 26-yarder in scoring 16 of Oklahoma’s 40 points in the win over Tulane on Saturday. He also was four for four on extra points.
His three field goals of over 50 yards set a new FBS record, and his 56-yarder that split the uprights at the close of the first half was a career long and the third longest in school history. Before Saturday no Oklahoma kicker had ever made more than one 50-yard-plus field goal in a game.
Brkic’s four field goals in the game tied a school record. His lone miss came in the third quarter from 31 yards out with a little over five minutes remaining in the game.
Now in his third season with the Sooners, Brkic is the Oklahoma career leader in field-goal percentage. He is 41 of 48 in field goal tries, an .854 percentage, and is perfect in 106 extra-point attempts.
The other Big 12 award winners in the first full week of the college football season were Texas running back Bijan Robinson, Offensive Player of the Week; linebacker Riko Jeffers of Texas Tech, Defensive Player of the Week and teammate Reggie Pearson Jr., Newcomer of the Week.