Looking Back: Oklahoma State Really Should Have Been Able to Run it Against Texas on Saturday

I guess I shouldn’t be astonished after seven years of doing this at how angry fans get about specific games. Facebook comments and Twitter replies that want Glenn Spencer and/or Mike Yurcich fired this week — as if that’s the path to get the No. 11 team in the country into the Big 12 title game.

Bodies of work matter. I apparently cannot write that enough times. I’m not going to sit here and defend Yurcich or Gundy or the offense for what happened in Austin on Saturday. They all stunk. Everybody. They scored 13 points on 16 drives. Even if you’re playing an amalgamation of Alabama defenses from the last 12 years, that’s awful. Kansas thinks that’s awful.

But I think I have a better understanding now after a few days of looking back on it of why it was awful. Maybe this was intuitive to most of you watching the game, maybe not. I know when I watch games, things are happening so quickly, it’s hard to decipher what’s going on. I’m the freshman quarterback for whom the game seems like it’s going 200 MPH, and I’ve been like that for the last seven years.

Anyway, Texas clearly said to Oklahoma State, We’re going to defend your running game with three linemen and one or two other guys behind them, and if it doesn’t work then that’s how we’ll lose. So Oklahoma State ran it. They ran it over and over and over again. They ran it left and right and up the middle and with different running backs and from different angles.

And it never worked.

I’ve long been a proponent of outcomes not retroactively determining whether decision-making was good or bad, and I think there’s some of that going on here. If Texas keeps showing you looks that scream, RUN IT ON US WITH YOUR ALL-AMERICAN TAILBACK WE DARE YOU, you should probably at least try it.

“It was a heck of a game plan, heck of an execution of that game plan by our players and defensive staff,” said Texas coach Tom Herman. “And we knew we needed to stop the pass, which is a bit unconventional, obviously.

“But we’ve figured we’ve got enough athletes and obviously you saw the different personnel that we had on the field that when they decided to run that we could get off blocks and didn’t need the extra hat, as you say, in the run game. That we were going to commit the extra hat to the throw game and get off blocks. We knew we were going to give up some yards on the ground.”

“We had concerns about trying to handle their front group running the football,” said Mike Gundy. “They have smart coaches, they know we’re down a couple linemen, and it creates a little bit of an issue. I would like to come in here and say no and say that they surprised us, but, no, we had an idea that they would do that, because it’s part of their base coverage.”

The biggest problem, as mentioned many places, is that Oklahoma State’s offensive line is currently full of players we all had to Google on Saturday afternoon.

Now, because of that, I do think there needs to be a little innovation on the offense’s part (Yurcich’s part), and there wasn’t. But I do understand why they did what they did for the most part.

I was scrolling through some highlights, and these shots stood out (and there are plenty of examples of this). I mean, only three players within four yards of the line of scrimmage? You have six-on-five at times in the box with the Cowboy Back, and you’re going to try and throw on that? It worked at times, because Rudolph hit some dimes, but it’s not the wisest thing to try it every down.

The bottom line here? Oklahoma State has to be better running the football, especially against teams that sell out to stop the pass. Or, with its beat-up line, it has to figure out ways to simulate running the football in the passing game (Todd Monken used to be excellent at this).

“We were just trying to find ways to run the football,” said Yurcich. “That was going through our head pretty much the whole game. It took us out of, obviously, our tempo. You’ve just got to get specific with your run calls. But when they’re playing that double cloud with the guy in the middle, you’ve just got to find ways to run the football.

“When you face a different tweak within a defense, you’ve got to be able to adjust, and sometimes those schemes that you practiced all week, if they’re not working, you’ve got to be able to call on something else. And that’s something we’ve got to do a better job of. That’s something that we can control, and that’s something I’ve got to do a better job of.”

“They did a great job of dropping underneath and dropping eight on many occasions,” added Rudolph. “They forced us to check the ball down, which we did. Justice (Hill) caught the ball really good in the backfield. We ran the ball great off and on, and then just getting some stalled drives there.”

So yeah, we can scream and whine about how Oklahoma State should have tossed it around the yard more on Saturday — and trust me, I did — but in looking back, I think the real issue is not that it didn’t try to throw it more, but that it should have been a lot more successful in the run than it was.

OSU averaged 2.9 yards per carry, which is just the 24th time in the Gundy era OSU has averaged 3 or fewer yards per carry in a game. This game, though, was the one with the most carries (51) of them all. Second most? The 2015 Texas game in Austin which Oklahoma State also won. They averaged 2.2 YPC on 46 carries.

Going into WVU week and Bedlam after that, Oklahoma State has to have a solution for this problem. I don’t know if it’s Justice Hill running those leaky routes over the middle out of the backfield or some variation of shorter routes from the wide receivers, but they need to have a contingency plan for an offensive line that’s being held together with Big League Chew and the dreams of a fan base. Because on Saturday, they did not, and it almost ended them.