Clay Horning
SAN DIEGO — Well, Sooner Nation, all’s well that ends well.
It was a trying season, one that ran the gamut from utter ineptitude to fantastic promise to heart-wrenching excitement and, thanks to Clint Ingram, ended with the quintessential requirement of all great victories.
A player making a play.
“This was the biggest play that I’ve ever made in any sport,” Ingram said a few minutes after sealing Oklahoma’s 17-14 Holiday Bowl victory over No. 6 Oregon Thursday night at Qualcomm Stadium. “I didn’t hear the call for the blitz so I just stuck (with the defensive set) and was able to make a play for the ball.”
You’ve just got to love Ingram’s first line. Like maybe if he’d hit a bottom-of-the-ninth-two-out-two-strike grand slam to win the little league championship in his native Hallsville, Texas, he might have been explaining how, game-saving interception and all, he had this bigger moment when he was 9.
Whatever, the senior linebacker put the post-Christmas wraps on the Sooners’ first bowl victory in three years.
It’s amazing to think, but for a program that went two straight regular seasons without a loss, it was still the culmination of an 8-4 campaign that closed up shop well before the new year and left its fans deliriously happy.
Odd, but fitting.
Make no mistake. This was OU’s down year. The likes of TCU and UCLA should not defeat this team again soon. The likes of Tulsa should not leave an Owen Field crowd squirming deep into the fourth quarter. Baylor has had its day in the overtime sun. Indeed, the Sooners show every sign of cycling their way back to the top of college football.
It’s going to get better.
But the down year was still no downer.
Written in this space Thursday morning, the case was made that OU could not lose to Oregon. In victory or defeat, the Sooners could still not lose. Left out was the idea they could still win. And with Holiday cheer their chaser, this was no throwaway season.
I still don’t understand why Paul Thompson received just his one and only chance. Really, if it was like that, no chance was the better route. Nonetheless, all signs point to the emergence of the Sooners’ next great quarterback and, for that matter, Rhett Bomar already has a bowl MVP under his belt, just like Nate Hybl. And who’s to say he won’t soon be compared with other Stoops’ era predecessors who were pretty good under center.
Travis Wilson began the season as OU’s go-to receiver, yet by the time Bomar was getting it to his receivers, it was all about Malcolm Kelly and, at the end, Juaquin Iglesias. Development like that may be painful, yet it’s another sign of a fine season.
But the biggest reason the down year was no downer?
This team won.
It lost four games, maybe one with an asterisk, but it won and it closed and, truth be told, might right now be one of the nation’s 10 best teams.
Give credit to the players. Give credit to the coaches. And give credit to the bandleader. Bob Stoops, confronted with the rare season he was forced to take his knocks, kept the boat afloat and the Sooners finished by sailing clear.
“We’ve been fighting all year,” Stoops said Thursday night.
He might have said it wasn’t pretty and that OU had been knocked down and, standing 2-3 and coming off a 33-point loss at the Cotton Bowl, things really could have gone south. Because they could have. Only they didn’t.
For everything it sets up, it was another solid season.
The Sooner Nation can’t look forward fast or far enough.
But for everything that went down, it was just as solid.
The Sooners emerged. And finally prevailed.
Clay Horning366-3526cfhorning@normantranscript.com
