Oklahoma football: So where do Sooners go from here?

Chalk one up for the naysayers of 2022 Oklahoma football.

Adversity struck new head coach Brent Venables and the Sooners for the first time on Saturday, exposing what some experts believe to be a vulnerability that could pour even more rain on the OU parade as the season moves forward.

The OU defense played its worst game of the 2022 season, and in some respects brought back fresh memories of the Sooners defensive debacles of the recent past. Kansas State employed a game plan Oklahoma wasn’t ready for, but perhaps should have been had the Sooner coaches more carefully thought through what K-State would do to correct its offensive struggles against Tulane the week earlier.

It wasn’t that surprising to see K-State quarterback Adrian Martinez use his speed and running ability more against OU. Either the Sooners weren’t ready for it, or they weren’t able to stop it, In reality, it was probably the combination of both. Either way, Martinez was a one-man wrecking crew and, literally, was the difference-maker in the game.

Martinez found the open receivers and got the ball to them with laser-like precision, a number of them coming on third-down conversions. And when you have an explosive playmaker like Deuce Vaughn in the backfield, it gives you a lot of offensive options. Adding Martinez’s mobility to the mix, can stretch a defense to the breaking point.

The K-State quarterback gained 148 yards on the ground against the Sooners. In three previous games, Martinez had run for 151 yards total.

“He (Martinez) has made a lot of big plays throughout his career, both with his arm and with his feet,” Sooner defensive coordinator Ted Roof told reporters after the game on Saturday. “He didn’t against Tulane, but unfortunately he did against us. Part of that was him, and part of that was us.”

The defense shouldn’t shoulder all the blame, however, for the loss to Kansas State. The usually efficient offense misfired on too many occasions, stalling potential scoring drives and forcing OU to turn the ball back over to the Kansas State offense. Mental errors also contributed to the Sooners downfall, resulting in 11 penalties for 87 yards, several extending K-State drives when the OU defense should have been able to get off the field.

O.K., that’s all water under the bridge now. The more important question is, what lessons have the Sooners learned from this and how can they get better from it?

Oklahoma historically has had difficulty defensively against mobile quarterbacks, and the next three opponents — TCU this week followed by Texas and then much-improved Kansas — present that same challenge to the Sooners.

The simplistic explanation for Oklahoma’s downfall against Kansas State was that the offense wasn’t able to stay on the field and sustain drives, while the Sooner defense wasn’t able to get third-down stops and get off the field.

At his regular weekly meeting with reporters on Monday, Roof said each and every practice he and the other OU defensive coaches stress the importance of “playing physical football, tackling well and preventing yards after contact.” For whatever reason, the Sooners fell short in the Kansas State game, he said, “and that’s my fault, and I’ve got to help get that fixed this week and moving forward.”

“We weren’t very disciplined tonight,” sophomore linebacker Danny Stutsman said in the postgame press conference Saturday night. “We know where our faults are, and we’re just going to be ready to come eager and hungry to come back.”

Offensively, coordinator Jeff Lebby stressed to reporters on Monday that there needs to be a heightened sense of urgency about starting faster, staying out of third-and-long situations that lower the odds of extending drives and staying on the field and, of course, avoiding costly pre-snap penalties that end up killing drives. He emphasized that all of that will be a focus this week in practice.

It’s important that Oklahoma doesn’t allow one loss carry over to the next weekend and become two. That is something Bob Stoops’ teams were masters at: Stoops was 31-1 in games coming off of a regular-season loss. The Sooners haven’t lost back-to-back games in the regular season since the 1999 season.

“I saw some things tonight that I just haven’t seen since we started,” Venables said after the game on Saturday. “We won’t be defined by this loss moving forward. We will, however, be defined by how we respond moving forward.”

More than half of the season still remains to be played and everything is still out in front of the 2022 Oklahoma team. The first test in the remainder of the season is Saturday at TCU.