10 Thoughts on OSU-Texas

BOX SCORE

I’m not sure what to write, what to think anymore. It’s so bad that I’m openly rooting to get to a basketball season in which my team is coached by Travis Ford and just lost two players to the NBA Draft.

I watched the entire second half on Twitter with my hands over my eyes like that cat emoji on the iPhone. Joey Harrington was making me laugh. Mike Yurcich was making me cry.

It was an emotional night!

Not really — it was awful. I don’t want it to be football season anymore. I want it to be over. Nevertheless, you come for thoughts. I have thoughts.

1. OSU got destroyed up front all night: This is really the only thought you need on the game and it’s brought to you by the head man himself.

#OKstate Mike Gundy: "It's pretty simple. We got manhandled up front offensively."

— Kyle Fredrickson (@kylefredrickson) November 16, 2014

It was a clown show in the trenches. You could have thrown 2005 Vince Young back there and he wouldn’t have had a shot in hell.

The offensive line woes beg a ton of questions, though.

Who is actually to blame for this season? Is it even anyone on the current staff? Will everyone get a free pass because our line is more questionable than the Tallahassee police dept.?

You can’t fire players, though you might like to as this was a common theme all night:

https://vine.co/v/O5g9nUFHE1d

https://vine.co/v/O5geTEzqj90

Daxx was sacked seven times. What’s the point of even evaluating the offense and/or watching film when that’s the case?

You can blame the QB, the coordinator, whoever you want. The reality is that when the foundation of your house is shaky, the whole thing will eventually fall.

2. Who’s the fall guy? On that note…I posited above that everyone on the coaching staff might get a free pass. That’s hypothetical and what would happen in a perfect world (or maybe in a totally fair world in which crazy passionate fans didn’t demand immediate answers from 19-year-olds).

We all know that won’t be the case. The crowd alone on Saturday in Stillwater calls for a head (or multiple heads to roll). One will likely be Mike Yurcich’s but I think there might be others, too.

These are tenuous times in Gundyville and he knows a lot rests on the next season or two. It’s probably time to re-load the coffers.

3. The drive chart is unbearable, I don’t want to look: Oh make it go away!

Final drive chart:

Punt
Punt
Punt
Punt
Punt
INT
Punt
Punt
Punt
TD
Fumble
End of game

🙁

— Pistols Firing (@pistolsguys) November 16, 2014

How about this? In OSU’s 59 drives since they came out of the locker room in Lawrence during the Kansas game, 50 of them have ended in punts or turnovers.

Fifty!

4. The crowd was egregious but it’s tough to blame them: Students don’t get a free pass here. There are six or seven massive parties on campus every year. You should attend all of them no matter the weather, no matter the team.

Alumni, I get it. And it’s technically smarter to speak with your attendance than with your ridiculous Twitter accounts. Even smarter to not buy tickets next season if you want the product to change.

But…

5. Mike Gundy is held hostage by his own success: The tension between not going to games because you demand a better product and having perspective for the body of work Gundy has done over the last decade is difficult to reconcile.

I don’t know what the answer is. Surely he gets a pass for one awful year in the last nine but the irony is that pre-2005 (and pre-Boone’s money, I get it) 5-4 and playing Texas, OU and Baylor to go to a bowl would have been pretty cool.

Now it’s an abomination.

Plus there are the players to think about. They don’t want to nearly get shut out against Texas as much as you don’t want them to.

I don’t have answers. Only an understanding that Mike Gundy’s job is to win games and fill up a stadium so that an athletic department can thrive. He’s not doing that this year and that’s a big issue.

6. The offensive ineptitude was historic: This was the 124th football game of the Mike Gundy Era (since 2005). Here are some rankings from tonight’s box score.

Rushing yards: 34 (122nd best game)[1. Did you know time: The two worst rushing games of the Gundy Era were both 13-yard performances. The first was 2005 at OU. The other? How about the Fiesta Bowl against Stanford.]

First downs: 9 (tied for 121st best game)[1. Only OU in 2005 and 2009 were worse.]

Total yards: 192 (122nd best game)[1. Only OU in 2005 and 2009 were worse.]

So congratulations, if you sat through (or watched) the entire game you saw a truly historic performance from the Pokes.

7. OSU’s assistant coaching changes have it in a corner: I thought this tweet from Seth Newton was really interesting.

@KOCOCarson they have better players than we did but we actually had a coaching staff.

— Seth Newton (@sethnewton15) November 16, 2014

I got a text from a national writer who said basically the same thing. He wondered aloud whether all the transition from assistant to assistant over the years was finally catching up to Gundy.

This isn’t a new theory, of course, it was floated by Brandon Chatmon a few weeks ago — but there’s a difference between “needing time to develop” and “being a bad football coach.”

It feels like we’ve drifted more towards thinking the latter over the past few months.

8. Emmanuel Ogbah and Josh Furman are really good: I think that’s an entire thought. It’s all I can conjure up about an individual player playing well tonight.

9. Where would that 4th quarter comeback ranked on the all-time unbelievability scale? I blame this guy, really:

https://vine.co/v/O5glpvIuAqF

He had me believing after the TD that something special (“special”) could happen in a pretty much empty Boone Pickens Stadium right before Tyrone Swoopes drove the dagger in.

While we’re here — I’m not sure how to feel about Swoopes. Doesn’t it seem like Texas should be better than it is right now? They have a beast offensive line, terrific defense, and good running game? What’s the other variable? Has to be Swoopes, right?

But then he made some throws that I was like “wow, they’re going to beat TCU.”

If he can make a Boykin-ish leap next season Texas will be terrifying again.

10. A lack of momentum is concerning: Among all the disconcerting things about this season, I think this might be No. 1:

@pistolsguy I don't expect 10 win seasons every year, but I do expect progress from a young team. They're actually regressing.

— Tara Zaloudek (@tarasuez) November 16, 2014

We’re going the wrong way.

Baylor is going to do NC-17 things to us next weekend in primetime and then we’ll get beat in some unfathomably awful way that hasn’t been invented yet by OU in the final week…and then what?

When 2012 happened there was at least something we could cling to going into that offseason. We’d nearly beaten (should have beaten) OU in Norman and then lit Purdue on fire in the Heart of Dallas Bowl.

Gundy keeps saying stuff like this:

Gundy: "I have a lot of confidence in where we're at … as people would want you to panic … I just don't believe in that."

— Kyle Fredrickson (@kylefredrickson) November 16, 2014

But I’m just not sure I see the upside to next season other than JW coming back and the offensive line being a year older. Is that enough to take you from historically awful (see above) to competing for a Big 12 title?

I’m not sure it is anymore.

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