Oklahoma football: Can Sooners avoid having one bad loss turn into two in Bedlam?

The Oklahoma football game at Kansas was a frightful affair, and not just because it came a couple of days after a full moon or a couple of days ahead of Halloween. It was downright ugly from an Oklahoma perspective.

There was enough blame to go around in this one to fill the locker room. The Kansas game is over, however. There is nothing the Sooners or their coaching staff to change what happened. All they can do is learn from it, grow from it and move forward with the games left to play this season.

The Sooners only have one loss. All the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the season are still out in front of them. What matters now, and what fans of the Sooners and others want to see is how Oklahoma responds to Saturday’s disappointing setback.

Oklahoma has a lot to clean up from the 38-33 loss to Kansas. What Sooner fans have to come to grips with is this is a very good OU team but not a great team. The Sooners are definitely better and deeper than they were a year ago, but this team does have flaws, and a number of those reared its ugly head in the bad weather at Kansas on Saturday.

Brent Venables has been saying all season that despite the 7-0 record to start the season, the Sooners are far from a finished product and still needed to get better in all aspects of the game.

“Didn’t play with discipline. Same thing two weeks in a row,” said Venables in his postgame press conference on Saturday. “Different ways, but it all counts the same. It’s discipline and a lack thereof. Eleven penalties for over 100 yards, three turnovers (and) not taking care of the football.”

Oklahoma clearly played its best game of the year in the win over Texas. The Sooners managed to win but did not play that well at home against UCF, and it finally caught up with them over the weekend at Kansas.

This is the first real adversity Oklahoma has faced in the 2023 season, and this weekend they go up against one of the hottest team in the Big 12 in Oklahoma State, a team that is clearly on a different trajectory currently than the Sooners. OSU has won four in a row and appears to be getting better every week. The Cowboys have won their last two games by an average of 23 points, and they will be playing at home on Saturday in what could be the final Bedlam game for the foreseeable future.

Venables does not believe the Sooners are suffering from a Texas hangover. It’s more a case of a lack of discipline and failure to execute, he says. There is some concern that OU is running into a buzz saw at Oklahoma State and may still have several key players out on both offense and defense.

The Sooners clearly are going to have to play better — better tackling, more aggressive and with greater physicality — than they have the last two weeks if they are going to avoid a second straight loss. OU’s biggest challenge is going to be limiting the rushing yards of OSU’s Ollie Gordan, who leads the nation with 1,087 yards on the ground and averages nearly eight yards per carry. In the past two games, Gordan has rushed for 270-plus yards.

The Kansas game served as a wakeup call for Oklahoma. I believe you will see a more focused, determined Sooner team against in-state rival Oklahoma State. The OU players and coaches will be determined to show what happened at Kansas was a one-off and not who the Sooners are.

“I’ve got confidence in them,” Venables said. “That’s football. We’ve got to be better in lots of parts of the game on both sides of the ball. There’s a lot that goes into it.”

Saturday at Oklahoma State will be a character test for this Oklahoma football team. Do they have it in them to rebound in a positive way, get the Kansas loss behind them and get the Sooners back on a winning track. We’ll find out on Saturday, but it won’t be easy.