Let’s not start the celebration just yet.
There is no doubt there is trouble down in Austinville. The natives there are ready to run second-year coach Charlie Strong out of town. Frankly, his Longhorn team has looked pretty pitiful this year, coming into Saturday’s Red River Shoot Out, Rivalry or Showdown (whatever advertisers want to call it this year) with a 1-4 record (0-2 in the conference); and, more significantly, looking more like Gooberville high school team than the mighty Texas.
Meanwhile, Sooners fans will throw out any reservations they have held about their own team this week — because showing signs of weakness is not what you do this week — and, besides, No. 9 Oklahoma has proven with wins on the road against Tennessee and at home against West Virginia, that a win against Texas isn’t a question of whether it will happen, but rather by how much.
Boomer Sooner baby. Oklahoma should roll.
Wounded animals … are not to be messed with. They can be angry and mean and likely to do all sorts of unpredictable things.
Wounded animals … are not to be messed with. They can be angry and mean and likely to do all sorts of unpredictable things.
And yet, haven’t we seen this scenario before? Back in 1996 Oklahoma came into this game worse than this year’s Texas. The Sooners were 0-4 (zero and four, folks) and had an offense in disarray under the tutelage of then first-year coach John Blake. Some how, some way, the Sooners managed to pull an upset of John Mackovic’s Longhorns (which finished the season No. 23), in overtime.
In hindsight, Sooner fans wish that win had never happened. Beating Texas in 1996 probably secured Blake two more seasons at Oklahoma. He only won 11 more games in his tenure at OU. But Sooner fans had to suffer through 18 more losses, including two losses to Texas in 1997 and 1998.
Strong may be Texas’ John Blake. Not to say he is a bad coach (Blake was). Or, that he spent too much time buying burgers at Classic Fifties after practice instead of preparing his team (Blake did).
But the circumstances in Austin are much the same. In 1996 the Sooner Schooner was wheel- less and its canopy burning uncontrollably. In 2015 Bevo is critically wounded and bleeding from every orifice. Heck, at last week’s shellacking in Fort Worth (TCU beat Texas 50-7 and it wasn’t that close — making Barry “hang half a hundred” Switzer proud of the purple frogs) one of the Texas players was on his cell phone Tweeting at halftime. Well, Tweeting at halftime is probably a more productive use of a Texas player’s time. Maybe a stroll on the Midway will come at halftime this week.
Before the TCU game the Texas coaches said they’d had the best week of practice all season. Imagine what the score would have been had practice stunk.
All in all, these are indicators that Strong might have lost control of his team. (My other self is replying, “Ya think?”)
But, wounded animals (I can’t avoid the Bevo references here — it’s OU-Texas week and that might as well be America’s Greatest Cliches Week) are not to be messed with. They can be angry and mean and likely to do all sorts of unpredictable things, and the Sooners have to beware precisely such from Texas when things kickoff for a late breakfast at the Cotton Bowl Saturday morning.
And lets not forget last year’s game, which was the worst performance on that Cotton Bowl field by both teams since one of my hung over trumpet playing buddies in the Pride of Oklahoma puked in the stands before performing at halftime in 1978 (Oklahoma won the game 31-10 in spite of it).
But Baker Mayfield is not last year’s QB. And, this Sooner defense is showing more signs of being able to tackle people at the line of scrimmage. So, Sooners should win by 30.
And, unlike 1996, the Texas fans might in the end be thanking the Sooners.
— Mike
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