NORMAN — If he had to do it all over again, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops still would have said it. He still would have walked into a packed banquet hall at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City and told a packed room of Sooner fans their dreams of a national championship in 2011 were legitimate.
Looking back, obviously, it didn’t happen. OU ended the season at 10-3 and without even a Big 12 championship.
“How are you going to do that?” Stoops said when it was suggested it might have been a good idea to temper expectations going into the season. “How are you going to do that at Oklahoma? What am I going to say? ‘No, shoot. We can’t win.’ Yeah, OK. Then I sound like Lou Holtz.”
The former Arkansas, Notre Dame and South Carolina coach was famous for billing every opponent as a national title contender.
Whether the Sooners were truly built to win one back in August is a debate that can rage without end. The bottom line was: external factors that affect seasons, and others that were internal, got in the way.
The No. 1 reason the Sooners fell out of the national title race was injuries. They started before the season ever got under way, with Travis Lewis’ toe injury, and never ceased.
By the time the season ended with Friday night’s 31-14 victory over Iowa, 12 starters had missed at least one game due to injury. Many of those were significant.
OU’s rushing grounded — at least without backup quarterback Blake Bell on the field — suffered after Dominique Whaley’s season-ending ankle injury. The passing attack never came close to recovering from the loss of Ryan Broyles, who missed the final four games. The kidney injury Jaz Reynolds suffered against Oklahoma State was another devastating blow.
The defense was as close to full strength as it had been all season in the Insight Bowl. Health was a reason it played at a dominant level to end the season.
Every football team deals with injuries, but the Sooners were hit harder than most.
“I don’t trumpet that, but you’re absolutely right it is,” Stoops said. “Those years you win (championships), you usually have had very few of it to deal with. Or maybe they miss one game, you have a tight game and they’re back. It’s those kinds of things.”
But there were other factors that affected the 2012.
In retrospect the death of Austin Box in the spring is something the Sooners are still dealing with. Seniors Frank Alexander and Jamell Fleming both said how important it was to win one final game for Box after the Insight Bowl.
“This was a real important game, not just to us, to the Box family,” Fleming said. “This is the last year Box would have been able to play with us. It means something special for us and doing it for them.”
The Sooners seemed to use the sorrow of their teammate’s death as a source of inspiration and rallying point. That didn’t carry throughout the season.
By the time the team headed to Arizona on Christmas Day, 10 players had left the team either by choice or as punishment for their actions.
OU also got a bad draw when it had to play at Baylor and at Oklahoma State for the second straight year. That happened to coincide with the Bears and the Cowboys have some of the best teams they’ve ever had.
“I also have a perspective of some of the difficulties we’ve gone through, starting all the way back to spring, with losing Austin,” Stoops said. “We lost guys throughout the year in different games that hurt us. And we lost a bunch of guys toward the end of the year that we really needed. Everyone makes a big deal about Iowa losing their running back. Well, lose your leading two receivers and then we’re even. They still had them. It changes you.
“I realize we weren’t quite as strong, after losing some guys. I always acknowledge some things as a staff. We can, or should, do better. But also we catch the bad draw, with having to go back to back to Baylor and Oklahoma State, on years where they’ve had the best seasons in the history of their program – out of 100 years. Some of the circumstances didn’t line up the best. That’s the truth, whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not.”
What Stoops will acknowledge is the expectations of the program he leads. OU one of the few places in a the country where a team can go 10-3 and the overriding result can be viewed as a failure. This will mark 11 straight years that OU’s gone without a national title.
“That’s what everyone’s thinking. And they’re restless. And it will be (about time) next year, too,” he said. “I can say it next year, that it’s about time.”
