Film Look: Three Takeaways from OSU’s Offense Against Texas Tech

Oklahoma State suffered their first loss of the 2018 season yesterday to the Texas Tech Red Raiders. The Cowboy offense only gained 386 total yards, their lowest total since 2016, and they struggled in many different areas as a unit.

I wanted to take a look at three things that stood out to me in this game and dive into them a little bit further below.

Missed Throws

Taylor Cornelius had, in my opinion, his worst performance of the season so far. He’s not the only one to blame for the offense’s lackluster performance, which we’ll discuss later on, but it a was tough overall outing for the fifth-year senior quarterback.

Cornelius finished the day 18 for 38 for 258 yards, 1 touchdown and 1 interception. Of these 20 incompletions, I counted 12 missed throws. The other eight were a combination of throw aways, solid defense and drops. We know TC has struggled with the deep ball all season, but tonight he was off on a variety of different throws.

He missed on both out routes and curl routes, intermediate throws we’ve seen him be pretty accurate on through the first three games of this season.

(Tylan rounded his break a bit, but still a missed throw in my opinion)

In addition, he missed a couple throws on the run, which we’ve seen him look so comfortable on this year. I honestly thought it was his biggest strength coming into the Tech game this weekend, but he wasn’t great on these throws yesterday.

And, we still see the struggles with the deep ball.

Gundy is behind Cornelius as the starter moving forward, but he took a big step back against the Red Raiders and he’s going to need to make a lot of corrections heading into next week’s game against Kansas. After four games worth of film, he’s still got a long way to go on the deep passes, as I haven’t seen much improvement since the opener.

Issues in Pass Protection

The Red Raiders finished the game with 2 sacks and 5 quarterback hurries (according to ESPN). They seemed to be causing havoc on dropbacks pretty much all game long. The Cowboy offensive line has struggled at times this season in pass protection, and it definitely didn’t improve on Saturday. There were missed assignments, guys getting flat-out beat and overall confusion at times on for the OSU linemen.

The first play I want to show actually ended in a touchdown for the Pokes, however, the protection was poor and it almost resulted in a sack if not for TC making a nice off-balance throw to J.D. King.

As you can see from the clip above, there are three Cowboy O-Linemen blocking one Tech defender, while another runs untouched to Cornelius. Here’s a still image of exactly what I’m referring to.

There’s some obvious confusion between Cowboy Back Logan Carter and left tackle Arlington Hambright on this play, which leads to a free rusher for the Red Raider defense.

In this next video, you see Hambright get bull rushed by his man and end up on his butt. This play probably wasn’t going to end positively after the low snap, but getting beat by your man like that doesn’t make matters any better for your quarterback.

If the quarterback isn’t having a great day throwing the football and the offensive line isn’t doing him many favors in pass protection, it’s usually going to end in an unproductive day for the offense. And, that’s exactly what we saw yesterday from the Pokes.

Inside Running Game

The Cowboys only had 24 rushing attempts against Tech on Saturday. The 2015 Baylor game is the last time OSU had this few of carries in a game. Now, the Red Raiders were loading the box at times and bringing their safeties down, but Justice Hill was running the ball with pretty consistent success and he finished the game with only 12 carries.

The Pokes saw success with the inside zone on several occasions.

In addition, they saw success on the counter with the guard and tackle pulling. In the video below, you see the addition of the fly sweep motion helped out here with the defense having to pay attention to the motion man. We really didn’t see this motion used too much against Tech. I saw it about five or six times and thought it could’ve been utilized more.

They did hit a draw play for one big run early, but after that they never really saw much production on the draw.

I know Gundy said he wanted Hill’s carries to even out to 15 attempts per game by the end of the season, but he’s currently averaging only 11.5 per game. You have to get this guy the ball more, especially when he’s breaking the type of runs he did against the Red Raiders.