Clay Horning
DALLAS — Not ready for prime time.How else can it be described?
Whether it be plays that could have been made that weren’t or, more likely, plays that never could have been made because the Sooners were in no position to make them because, look at that, another false start, Saturday afternoon at the Cotton Bowl was nothing more than an indictment of Oklahoma football.
So Texas has won two straight in the series and if the Longhorns run the table, maybe they can still get in the national-title picture and Mack Brown is just two more of these victories away from pulling even with Bob Stoops, so maybe that’s part of the story, too. The way Brown and his program have been treated upon losing this game, it should be.
But it’s only a small part.
Because if the Longhorns were good, the Sooners were inexplicable. And not inexplicable because they can’t play, but because they can, and chose to fall apart instead.
It’s not like this game wasn’t there for the taking. It’s not even like all indications weren’t that it would be OU that did the taking. But all indications were worth bubkis on a day the Sooners couldn’t and, there with about 101/2 minutes remaining, wouldn’t play.
If Roy Williams’ leap of faith is the high-water single moment of the northern half of the Red River Rivalry since Stoops and Brown began sharing the same Cotton Bowl tunnel, then the little swing pass intended for Adrian Peterson that Paul Thompson didn’t quite throw forward is the new low.
A questionable call if only because what ended up happening could end up happening, and not well executed as Thompson threw high and a tad behind Peterson, it’s the new low for neither of those reasons.
It’s a new low because Peterson quit on the ball. He just quit. Meanwhile, other Sooners were kind of looking at each other, which is kind of like begging the officials to bale them out.
When the review failed to go OU’s way, Stoops dismissively waved his headset at the officials, which is football sign language for “whatever.” But his quarrel was not with the officials.
Not that it mattered. The Sooners were already several turnovers into the game, it was only the latest. But they hadn’t quit on the others.
Remember how relaxed and confident Stoops appeared during the week?
Turns out, believe it or not, it was well-founded. The Sooners offered proof in the first half, highlight reel not included.
“We did not need to have a great game. We did not need to play above our head and have everything go our way,” offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson said. “We just had to be up to playing like we’re capable, to play together and as a group.”
And even as the Sooners left points on the field before the half, they were dominating everywhere but the scoreboard. But the rest of the way, they gave it away.
Of six fumbles in all, Texas recovered three.
Thompson threw two interceptions
The Sooners committed 11 penalties, resulting in 72 marked-off yards.
They are the exact types of breakdowns that hardly ever happened the first six years of the Stoops era, back when OU set a standard as a team that never beat itself.
It seems a long time ago.
Stoops offered the bright side.
“Like I said, we’re a far better team than we were a year ago and we’re just going to take them one at a time and we could still have a heck of a year. Who knows what’s going to happen,” he said.
It wasn’t coachspeak and he wasn’t offering any media spin.
Instead, it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Let him spend some time with the game tape and he’ll pull it off because it was his team with 333 yards of total offense and Texas with 232, including just a single yard in the second quarter.
Of course, it was also his team that took an early sack to be pushed out of field-goal range, that stalled after facing second-and-2 at the Texas 15 and had to settle for a field goal right before the half, just as it was his team that was all-too-often challenged even to snap the ball, turning first-and-10 into first-and-15 or whatever the down and distance happened to be.
“It’s frustrating,” Stoops said.
It’s off the charts frustrating.
The same day OU proves the kind of football it’s capable of playing is the same day it proves just how far it is away from playing that very same kind of football.
It’s a riddle, all right.
A 28-10 loss, too.
Clay Horning366-3526cfhorning@normantranscript.com
