Balance of power in Oklahoma football has shifted for 2024 and beyond
By Chip Rouse
Throughout Oklahoma's illustrious football history, the Sooners have been more often associated with offensive greatness than anything else.
This doesn't mean that OU hasn't had some outstanding defensive teams. The Sooners had some very good defensive teams with All-American talent on that side of the ball in the Barry Switzer coaching era, despite the fact Switzer was more of an offensive-minded coach.
And although defensive football has seemingly been more of an afterthought at Oklahoma the past 10 years or so, the Sooners had some strong defensive teams in the early years of the Bob Stoops reign, including a defensive masterpiece against an explosive Florida State offense that won OU its seventh national championship in the 2000 season.
Brent Venables was part of those stellar OU defensive teams in the early 2000s along with Mike Stoops, and Venables is in the process of reengineering and restoring much of what Oklahoma has been missing on that side of the ball over the past decade. In fact, what Venables and his defensive coaches have accomplished in just two seasons, both personnel-wise and performance-wise, has been pretty significant.
If you were to rank the nine major position groups that make up the Oklahoma football team for the coming 2024 season based on how strong each group is in relation to the overall team, I would challenge you to come up with an order that doesn't include three of the top four or five being defensive position groups. The linebacker corps (Danny Stutsman, Kip Lewis or Jaren Kanak and Dasan McCullough as the Cheetah backer) is clearly the strongest group on the defense and maybe the entire team). The wide receivers may have something to say about that.
Returning senior safety and preseason All-SEC First-Teamer Billy Bowman anchors what could be Oklahoma's best defensive secondary in a long time. And Venables has used traditional recruiting as well as the transfer portal to construct a formidable defensive front that is pretty sure to create some problems and disruption for opposing SEC offenses this season.
What all of this adds up to is the balance of power in Oklahoma football is shifting, and in a good way, as Venables and his defensive coaches continue to bring in elite talent on that side of the ball and construct a defensive presence that is both complementary and difficult to sustain any kind of offensive consistency against.
Phil Steele's 2024 College Football Preview publication, considered by many to be the bible of college football, ranks the OU defensive back unit and linebackers as the second best in their respective categories in Division 1 football this season and the defensive line as 21st nationally. The receiver corps was the only Sooner offensive position group to rank in the top 10 (6th).
Don't look for the Sooners to sacrifice offense at the expense of getting much better on defense -- in other words, push the pendulum too far in the other direction -- but it has been shown numerous times in the recent past that if Oklahoma had had even an average defense to go along with a typical high-octane and balanced Sooner offense, we could have been looking a couple more national championships by now.
The balance of power is definitely beginning to shift in OU football, and that is a telltale sign that SEC teams may need to start getting ready for the Sooners rather than the other way around.