For Sooners, they're all big games now
Victory not enough against Houston. Oklahoma must get better immediately
Author’s note: This really should appear Friday, but I’ve got an assignment tonight that I’ll want to put into the world on Friday, if not late tonight, so this one’s popping early, almost two days before it appears in The Norman Transcript. Also, apologies, I will be missing in action beginning Saturday while cruising with the great Gwenda, which will be great because she’s great. So, enjoy this please.
The SEC really is a brave new world and you can feel it even in Week 2, even against a believed-to-be-nothing-happening team like Houston.
Urgency.
If you have to be told to feel it, made to respond to it or educated upon it being required, you’re already late to it.
Yet, one game in, a near 50-point victory over Temple, and it’s already upon the Sooners, whether they know it or not, even against a Houston team chosen to finish 15th in the Big 12.
It sounds wrong. It’s not wrong.
Remember the old days, last season and beyond, when whoever OU’s opponent was prior to Texas, a perpetual storyline was the need to be sharp in that game; to wring as much out of that game as possible; to fix all “correctable” errors needing fixed in that game; to earn all available confidence in that game, because the Longhorns are next?
That’s gone because, perhaps the opener aside, that’s what every game ought to feel like in the Sooners’ new conference because the SEC comes so fast.
Given OU’s offensive line struggles against the Owls, which led to running-the-ball struggles until the fourth quarter when Taylor Tatum and Sam Franklin, a true freshman and redshirt junior, who spent last season at Tennessee-Martin, finally put some runs together, it’s a good thing it’s only Tulane looming next week, rather than 14th-ranked Georgia, which arrives the week after.
Yet, close enough.
Oh, by the way, if you’re right now trying to remember the Sooners’ tune-up-for-Texas contest this year, it’s Auburn, at Auburn, which is no tune-up at all, but a grind-it-out-victory-if-you-can-earn-it kind of game.
Come to think of it, given Brent Venables' history in the Big 12 and ACC, does he have any experience against a schedule like this? Does offensive coordinator Seth Littrell or defensive coordinator Zac Alley?
Do they get it?
It’s not enough to post another 51-3 victory, as the Sooners earned against the Owls, if it’s arrived at identically.
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