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Sooner defense will have to rise to the occasion against Mountaineers

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I sure do miss defense in college football. Seems like everywhere you look, in any league, offenses are just having their way.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when Tulsa racked up over 600 yards of offense and scored 38 points against the Sooners Saturday before last. Running the Baylor offense, the Hurricane picked apart the Oklahoma secondary.

Didn’t help that true freshman P.J. Mbanasor was thrown to the wolves at corner when Jordan Thomas was suspended for the game due to violation of team rules. But that can’t be an excuse. The secondary was just terrible.

But they aren’t alone. Look around college football. Gone are the 17-10 defensive battles of the past. You had better score 40 plus if you want to win in this the new age of the spread offense that is sweeping the college football landscape. It’s not just the Big 12 anymore. It’s everywhere. Big 10, Pac 12, even the SEC are all now lighting up the scoreboards. And I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

The rules give the offense the advantage and that is the way the powers that be want it. High scoring fast tempo games are great for TV ratings. And television money runs the whole college football world.

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Does Mayfield have the ‘stuff’ to QB Sooners to a championship?

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While I don’t know where I came to the conclusion, I thought Baker Mayfield was less than 6 feet tall and under 190 pounds. With that misconception, I set out to see how he compared to the top quarterbacks in Division One college football. So, without first confirming Mayfield’s physical attributes, I set about garnering such information for the quarterbacks of the AP’s Top 10 teams in this week’s poll. Here are the results.

The average sized quarterback of a Top 10, Division One team is 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 221 pounds.

With this information in hand, I was thinking that Baker Mayfield is considerably smaller than quarterbacks of teams in the hunt for the four playoff spots. So, I decided to look up Baker’s numbers to make sure.

At 6 foot 2 inches tall, Baker is the same height as the quarterbacks for the 3rd and 4th ranked teams and only an inch shorter than the QBs of the 5th and 9th ranked teams. Weighing 214 pounds he is nominally as heavy or heavier than the QBs of the 3rd, 4th, 7th and 9th ranked teams. With respect to the QBs of the four teams most predicted to make the playoffs, Mayfield is 2 inches shorter and 21 pounds lighter than the average of two and nominally the same size as the other two.

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Defense must improve, or Sooners are in trouble (Where are the Selmon brothers when we need them?)

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garys blog1_100x300Two weeks ago, after the Akron game, I said that we would have to await the Tennessee game to see if Oklahoma deserved its then No. 19 ranking. I was wrong. Not because the answer from that game was in the negative but because we didn’t really get an answer.

Now, after week-three and the game with Tulsa, we still don’t know if the Sooners are capable of playing with the big dogs. At least three questions remain.

First, what is the status of the offensive line? I think it fair to say that the O-line was pretty ineffectual against the Vols until the fourth quarter when its apparent better conditioning took over. Even then, one of the premier running backs in the country (Samaje Perine) wasn’t consistently sprung free. And, it’s not clear to what extent that’s because Lincoln Riley is still trying to learn how to use a top-rung running back in his air raid offense. Additionally, Mayfield was constantly scrambling.

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