Oklahoma football: Four downs on continuation of the ‘Cat curse

The last time K-State quarterback Adrian Martinez faced an Oklahoma football team, he was wearing a Nebraska uniform. He had an average afternoon numbers-wise in a 23-16 OU victory.

On Saturday night, he was like Superman in a Kansas State uniform, almost single handily taking on and taking down a seemingly overmatched Sooner team that entered the contest as the No. 6-ranked team in the country and playing on its home turf.

Kansas State torched an Oklahoma defense that had held opponents to under 400 yards and 10 points a game through the first three games. Not so on this sultry Saturday night at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.

In the past 10 seasons, Oklahoma has lost just nine games when playing in front of the home folk. Kansas State is responsible for four of those. Maybe it’s a good thing that the Sooners are moving to the SEC in the next couple of years. This, in fact, could be the last time they ever have to host a game with Kansas State, who have bested the Sooners more than any other opponent not named Texas in the Big 12 era.

You’d think Sooner fans would be tired of hearing the same old refrain after an upset loss to K-State in Norman.

“They (Kansas State) were the better team tonight. They played more physical than us, with better fundamentals and with better precision on both sides of the ball,” said OU head coach Brent Venables in his postgame comments.

“We didn’t handle success very well,” he said, “but sometimes it’s just the other team…they just out-played you, out-coached you.”

Yes, they did.

The bottom line is: That is the way it seems to be every time they visit Owen Field.

You have to go back to 2016 to the last time Oklahoma trailed in a football game at home from start to finish (45-24 loss to Ohio State).

Here’s how it all happened this time around:

First down

KSU quarterback Adrian Martinez was a one-man wrecking crew. With his legs and his arm, the Nebraska transfer accounted for 382 of Kansas State’s 509 yards of total offense and five touchdowns. He finished with 21 of 24 passing for 234 yards, about 50 yards fewer than last year when Nebraska played at OU, but the difference on Saturday night was what he did with his legs. Martinez added 148 rushing yards on 21 attempts, an average of seven yards per carry, including four touchdowns.

A year ago with Nebraska, Martinez gained just 34 yards on the ground against the Sooners. In fact, the week before playing Oklahoma in K-State’s loss to Tulane, he ran just 13 times in the game for 59 total yards. Obviously, the Kansas State coaches felt they had to open up the offense more against the Sooners.

Martinez’s 55-yard run on a third-and-16 play with under two minutes remaining in the game was the play that broke the Sooners’ back. Two plays later, Martinez crossed the goal line with his fourth rushing touchdown of the game, extending the K-State lead to 34-20 and effectively putting the game out of reach.

Second down

While K-State’s Martinez was able to make the big play seemingly every time he needed it, OU’s Dillon Gabriel was out of synch with his receivers too often and, unfortunately, at pivotal points in the game. Looking solely at the stats after the game, it would appear that Gabriel played good enough to win the game. He passed for 330 yards and four touchdowns, with no interceptions, and rushed for 61 net yards

The Sooners were just 4 of 13 in third-down situations, and on several of third-down conversion opportunities, Gabriel threw wide or high of the mark to open Sooner receivers. This was highly uncharacteristic for the normally very accurate OU quarterback.

The loss to Kansas State wasn’t all on Gabriel, however. “He gave us a chance to win the game,” Venables said after the game, “and we didn’t do our jobs as a football team to help him.”

“I’m a bad loser, for sure,” Gabriel said in the postgame interview session. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want back, but shoot, most importantly, I want a lot of things back that I gotta be better in and will be better in.”

Third down

Oklahoma could not get out of its own way, committing too many costly mistakes, often at the worst possible time and place on the field. There were execution mistakes on both sides of the ball, and on defense, players out of position and unable to make plays at critical times.

The Sooners were flagged 11 times for 87 yards, and three of those led to first downs and extended Kansas State drives. There were also a bunch of motion penalties called on the offense that placed the Sooners behind the chains and off schedule early in possessions.

The 11 penalties were the most by an OU team since committing 12 for 74 yards in a loss to Oklahoma State last season.

“You know, we’re at home and you would think on offense we wouldn’t have those procedures (calls). We really shot ourselves in the foot,” Venables said.

Fourth down

As we all know in sports, as in life, the best team doesn’t always win. It’s the team that plays best on that particular day. There’s nothing the Oklahoma coaches, players, or even the fans, can do about the loss to Kansas State. In the best coachspeak: What matters now is how the Sooners respond going forward. The last thing you want to happen is allow one bad loss turn into two, three and so forth.

“We’re down in the mud right now, there’s no doubt about it,” Venable said, “but we’re going to take this one on the chin and try to learn and grow from it.

“We have two options on how we respond moving forward. I feel strong and have a clear vision on how I think our guys will respond to this.”

It won’t take long before we find if the Sooners are able to bounce back from this. They play at TCU next Saturday.