It’s about the offense, of course it’s about the offense, it’s always about the offense for this team.
If it can play well, or if it can graduate into becoming, oh, let’s just call it a “good” offense, there’s no reason to believe Oklahoma can’t win Saturday and thereafter finish 10-2 in the regular season and return to the College Football Playoff.
That doesn’t mean it would happen, for running the SEC table remains very difficult for any team, Georgia and Alabama included.
But it could happen, and it’s on the table, should that graduation occur.
So, quick, what’s the best thing we can say about the Sooner offense right now?
Perhaps that it’s gone a whole game without committing a turnover, which is something, even if quarterback John Mateer fumbled in the first quarter against Texas and it was a miracle Ryan Fodje got it back?
Perhaps that OU gained 169 yards of total offense in the second half last Saturday, a big number against the Texas defense, made better by accumulating 82 of them on the ground following a single yard before the half?
Those are good ones, but I’m here to offer another.
Though we can’t know if the Sooner offense has been transformed, I think it’s pretty clear offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle has.
Like, here he was on Tuesday upon being asked what he envisions when he envisions the offense at its best:
When this offense is at its best, I envision us doing whatever it takes to win the football game. If we have to go out there and score every single drive, let’s do that. That’s the goal, every drive, is to score. But if it’s also play complementary, take care of the ball, make timely plays and that’s what it takes to win, then that’s what it takes.
Even mentioning scoring every drive feels like a cool breeze of possibility for an offense that’s routinely been asked to do very little.
Also, you had to love Arbuckle’s subtle outing of “complementary football” as a term that really means putting your offense on the shelf. Do you see that, Brent Venables? No need to ever invoke it again.
That’s one.
Here’s another, when Arbuckle was asked about freshman offensive lineman Noah Best getting better and better:
He’s tough, he’s physical, he’s violent … and he strains to the finish, he hypes up his teammates.
Nobody probably really saw it but my favorite play of the game was just a simple pass protection that he had. He blocked his guy, [Mateer] hit a check down to Lloyd [Avant], Lloyd broke a tackle, spun out of it, turned a 3-yard gain into 8 yards and Noah just jogged over there and just hyped him up, kind of gave him a quick shove.
You want to talk about being an awesome teammate and building confidence, well Noah Best built even more confidence in Lloyd Avant right there.
Arbuckle may not know, but if you watched the game on television and didn’t turn away from the screen, you actually did see Best, a freshman, give Avant, a junior, a hype shove.
Also, if you didn’t notice, it has to be the first time in recent memory, at least, Arbuckle took a question asking only for garden-variety positivity, his heretofore specialty, and turned it into a shiny nugget of real stuff, ready for a feature story about Best, the offensive line, Avant or just how different OU appeared against Texas than it had before Texas.
What Arbuckle’s mostly done previously is tell us how great a guy somebody is, how hard that guy’s trying, how he believes that guy has a chance to be very good, how he’s doing good things, how he’s a good teammate, but hardly, hardly, hardly, ever, ever, ever give us anything about results, about how one thing happened, making another thing happen, adding value in real time, on the field, where it matters.
He has dealt in fluff.
He’s now leapt into reality.
He has something to say.
The old Arbuckle, let’s hope he’s gone for good, I’ve chalked up to being afraid of being made wrong by his players and, maybe it’s the same thing, his own lack of confidence in them. But he saw something different last Saturday and it’s made him a different coach this week, and if he’s transformed, maybe it means his offense has for real turned the corner, too.
Then came his explanation for the offensive line finally moving people around, leading to those 82 second-half ground yards.
I think they were tired of not running the ball well. I think they were tired of hearing it. I think I said it last week in here, and I preached it to the offense too, if you’re tired of hearing something, then change it, do something about it.
It was a rivalry game, it was all that, but those guys played physical. They had a mindset about them that has to carry over. It has to carry over into the game. It has to carry over into practice, and you have to build on it.
A couple of things.
Is he taking a shot at offensive line coach Bill Bedenbaugh, who apparently couldn’t get his charges to play the way they’re capable of playing, leaving us to wait until they really were sick and tired of being sick and tired?
Or do you think, as I do, he wasn’t, but let it ride anyway, unafraid of the consequences because the new Ben Arbuckle is beyond wasting his energy worrying about how his words will play both within and beyond the program.
I’ve got to tell you, looking at what Kentucky has done this season, running and throwing the ball, breaking the 300-yard barrier of total offense in all six of its games and 400 in three, while OU has averaged 280.5 in its four games since dispatching Texas-El Paso, it’s hard not to pick the Wildcats.
Did you know their quarterback, Kenny Minchey, has thrown 11 touchdown passes and only one interception, while Mateer has … well, you know?
So go figure, believe what you want to believe, extrapolate what you want to extrapolate. But should you be looking for something that’s really changed, right before our eyes, that might have legs?
Take a look at Arbuckle, who’s broken his chains.