Oklahoma football: So what do we make of OU heading into Week 3?
By Chip Rouse
Two weeks into the 2021 Oklahoma football campaign, we have two games down, a couple of wins in the books, but we still aren’t exactly sure what to expect of the Sooners this season.
The narrow five-point win over a Tulane team no one expected to be that good didn’t provide a lot of comfort among Oklahoma fans that this was going to be the Sooners’ year. For the record, though, Tulane beat up on Morgan State in Week 2 scoring 69 points in the process. An even better test comes their way this weekend, when the Green Wave visit No. 17 Ole Miss.
By season’s end, we might just see a Tulane team with a better record and a stronger performance level than anyone anticipated heading into the 2021 season. At the very least, the Tulane coaches had the Green Wave well prepared to take on then-No. 2 Oklahoma on the road and especially following a climatic week of flooding and widespread damage in New Orleans and surrounding communities caused by Hurricane Ida.
Remember the Tulane game was originally scheduled to be played in New Orleans. The hurricane notwithstanding, it’s probably best for OU that it wasn’t.
Oklahoma responded as most everyone thought it would in welcoming Western Carolina from the FCS ranks to Gaylord Family – Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. The Sooners lit up the scoreboard, winning 76-0. But what does that really mean in the overall scheme of things?
Scoring a lot of points doesn’t necessarily equate to a perfect game
In his weekly press conference on Tuesday, Lincoln Riley said you look at the scoreboard, and because of the large margin of victory, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you played a perfect game. The Sooners’ head coach acknowledged that the Sooners did do a lot of positive things in the game — you don’t run up 76 points and not do a lot of things right — but some of that success in the game wasn’t the result of sharp execution as much as just having better players. Some of those successes won’t be as prevalent when the competition gets better, which it is about to do.
The Western Carolina game score was big, but the OU head coach cautions that the Sooners still need to get a lot better in all phases of the game. The scoreboard told one story, but the reality is the OU performance was no where near perfect, Riley said.
Oklahoma will be able to tell a lot more about what it truly has this season, both offensively and defensively, over the next four weekends. The Sooners host a Nebraska team that has endured some rough sledding since leaving the Big 12 for the Big Ten in 2011.
Nebraska’s first six seasons in the Big Ten, the Cornhuskers put together an overall record of 52-27 and 31-16 in the conference. The last four seasons, however, have not been nearly as productive for the Huskers: 16-28 overall and 12-23 in the Big Ten.
Don’t let Nebraska’s recent struggles fool you
Nevertheless, Riley was effusive in his praise for the Nebraska team coming to Norman on Saturday. Riley said he hadn’t seen a lot of Nebraska games on tape from recent seasons, but what he has seen in reviewing tape for Saturday’s game tells him they are a good team, well coached and with quality players all over the field.
Some of that is coachspeak, obviously, in not wanting his OU team to get a big head and underestimate the strength of the opponent coming in this weekend.
After Nebraska, the Sooners host a West Virginia team that is as good as any team in the Big 12 and then head to the Little Apple in Manhattan, Kansas, to go up against a good Kansas State team that has given Oklahoma all kinds of trouble, including beating OU the last two years. That is followed by the annual Red River Showdown with Texas in Dallas. And we all know you can throw season records and rankings out the window for that one.
After that dangerous four-game gauntlet, hopefully Oklahoma will be 6-0 at the midway point in the 2021 season, but you can be sure we’ll all know by then what this 2021 Sooner team is made of and whether or not they are legitimate national title contenders.