Oklahoma football: What do TV schedulers have against Sooners?

If you are a fan of Oklahoma football you sure as heck don’t want to relive what happened the last two times the Sooners played a football game that kicked off at 11 a.m.

I hesitate to bring it up, but the most recent of those two early games was the infamous Kansas game, which has to be the low point of Oklahoma’s season — even in victory — and let’s hope it stays that way.

Oklahoma will play its fifth 11 a.m. game of the season on Saturday at Baylor, as well as on the following weekend, at home against Iowa State on Nov. 20.

The Sooners are 4-0 playing in the earliest TV time slot, but two of those early starts, both away from Norman, have been near disasters for the Crimson and Cream, particularly in the first 30 minutes of the game.

So far this season Oklahoma has had an early wake-up call — both in a literal and figurative sense — in games with Tulane, Nebraska, Texas and Kansas.

The Sooners trailed Texas 28-7 at the end of the first quarter and 35-17 more than halfway through the second quarter. We all know what happened in the second half, but the opening 30 minutes was downright ugly if you are an OU fan.

Had it not been for a brilliant heads-up move by quarterback Caleb Williams on fourth down play late in the game against Kansas, the six-time defending Big 12 champion Sooners could have suffered the embarrassment of losing to the worst team in the conference in what would have been the biggest upset of the college football season.

That game began at 11 a.m., and it was as if Oklahoma sleepwalked through the entire first half. Three possessions, 78 yards of total offense and no points by the Sooners in the first 30 minutes of the game.

Are you sensing a trend here?

After trailing 10-0 at halftime, the Sooners rallied for 35 second-half points and a 35-23 victory over Kansas. But that performance served as a microcosm of what has been going a good part of the season for Oklahoma, a preseason favorite to win the Big 12 and make this season’s College Football Playoff.

Oklahoma will have played 10 games after this weekend and half of them have been 11 a.m. starts.

After the Baylor game, FOX will have televised three of the Sooners’ five early games as part of it Big Noon Kickoff program, which is the featured time slot for FOX’s Saturday coverage of college football.

Presumably, because of the Big 12’s media agreement with FOX (and also ESPN/ABC) and because Oklahoma is one of the top teams in the country, the FOX network ostensibly likes to pick up the Sooners’ game for its featured time slot. For similar reasons, OU has appeared in the early game on ABC and ESPN already this season.

Before he retired, former Sooner head coach Bob Stoops, who ironically is now a member of the FOX “Big Noon Kickoff” pregame program, was highly critical of all the 11 a.m. games OU was having to play. He probably likes them now, especially when FOX carries the Oklahoma games, because he gets to be on set and in the house to see his son, Drake, play for the Sooners.

Something else of note: FOX titles it’s first college football broadcast of the day “Big Noon Kickoff because that is the time its airs on the East Coast. Because of the one-hour time difference, it is 11 a.m. in the Midwest, where most all of the current and future Big 12 teams are located.

Lincoln Riley’s response to all of this is noncommittal. We don’t have any control over all of that, he says. Just tell us where to be and when and will be there and ready to play. We’ll play anybody, anywhere, even in a parking lot if we have to.

Here’s hoping the Sooners heed their head coach’s rallying cry at Baylor on Saturday.