A team can win or a team can lose. It can play below or above itself.
It can scale great heights or plummet to horrendous depths. It can do all of these things over the course of a single season.
Or, it can suffer the worst possible fate. It can become ... irrelevant.
There are so many things Oklahoma can't become this season. You know the spiel. It can't win a championship, can't go to a BCS bowl, it can't even go to a bowl of any kind just yet.
Among the things it can still become, one is that horrible word. For a single season, it cannot matter.
Bob Stoops has never had a season like it.
From Mike Balogun's past apparently catching up to him, to an All-American tight end losing his season the week it was to begin, to Sam Bradford shouldering the worst of breaks (or separations) after opting for one more college try, to an offensive line that, despite struggling, has developed an entirely new question mark, that of availability.
The Sooners are left to play the cards they're dealt.
They're in danger of it being much ado about nothing.
Since Stoops came along on the No Excuses Express, all of his big disappointments have come on the great stage. At the Sugar Bowl one season, the Orange Bowl the next, both BCS championship games, then last season, back in Miami, left to finish in second place again.
The Les Miles coached Cowboys handed him back-to-back bitter defeats, then Miles shot off his mouth and Stoops shot off his and it was all great fun and it mattered.
His first year he lost four regular season games, but it was a whole different world just as soon as OU dispatched Louisville at Papa John's Stadium. The Sooners should have beaten Notre Dame and should have beaten Texas, but they didn't and still the new coach could do no wrong.
Irrelevancy had been shed, four seasons of it and maybe more. It really descended upon the program just as soon as Gary Gibbs became a lame duck.
The last down season was 2006, but darn if Rhett Bomar went from fumbling what seemed like every single snap to being named MVP of the Holiday Bowl a few days after Christmas. The fans had their gift.
The next one appeared lost before it began, Bomar getting his walking papers not only from the program, but from Big Red Sports and Imports, too. The guy just quit showing up, you know?
But in came Paul Thompson to save the day.
OU lost to Boise State in Glendale, Ariz., but it's hard to be irrelevant you've bagged a conference title.
This season is so different.
Even if OU wins out, what it have really accomplished? The line's going to be rebuilt all over again. The numbers are bound to be remain down and the best one, Trent Williams will have left. How do the Sooners do more than tread water?
It's hard to know but there's got to be a way.
Maybe they can play three clean games, win them all and Landry Jones keeps getting better. Maybe they can not just win out, but do it with dominance. Perhaps, finally, another receiver will catch up to Ryan Broyles and stay there.
There's got to be something that won't make next season feel like starting over.
It starts with winning today and then we'll see.
There's got to be something.
Clay Horning 366-3526 cfhorning@normantranscript.com
