Love | Hate

On Saturday night/Sunday morning (depending on how you look at it) I wrote a post about the Louisiana game in which I said OSU didn’t look like a top ten team. I went on to criticize the student section (for leaving early), Brandon Weeden (for all his picks), the marketing department (for that horrid intro video), and the uniforms (I couldn’t see the numbers).

I think I came off like some sort of closet OU “I’m going to complain unless we beat teams 80-0” type who just wanted to sit at my desk and take shots at everything that didn’t pleasurably stroke my oversized expectations.

That’s not true (“that ain’t true!!”) and I probably overreacted to a few things. At the same time though, I expect a lot from a fan base, a program, and a team that believes it has arrived in a blaze of glory on the national stage. I guess I should have titled my post “Saturday night didn’t feel like a top 10 experience.”

Here are my takes on a few lingering things from the weekend:

First, to the students, I tweeted it out on Saturday night but let me reiterate: this is once-in-a-lifetime stuff. I know we’re playing Louisiana and you have better stuff to do involving ping pong balls and plastic cups, but I just hope you don’t take this season for granted. At some point this year this team is going to need you for a quarter, for a half. I hope you’re ready. And to your credit, I have NEVER seen the student section as full it was 15 or 30 minutes prior to kick. Props for that.

The uniforms (my gosh, how hard are we going to drive the uniform talk into the ground this year?) – They were fine. I came home and re-watched some of the game on TV and they actually looked pretty sharp. I think the gray will look terrific on something other than white. Although I stand by my statement that you absolutely cannot tell who’s who on the field from the stands. I feel bad for all the booth spotters this year, well, except for whoever’s spotting for Craig James and Jesse Palmer. If you’re foolish enough to run around with those two then I don’t really feel bad for you about anything.

Also, to those wondering about the “sweaty stomach panels” (can we call them that?) – it IS in fact sweat (see pic of a non-sweaty Chelf…hope I never type that sentence again) and it’s also a different material which just accentuates the sweat. See examples here and here.

The intro video – it’s terrible and you can’t convince me otherwise. Although one of my Twitter followers did mention that they’re planning on inserting new highlights every week and didn’t want to include very many from last year because OSU had different uniforms. I’d be more okay with this but, as the same follower pointed out, we got punked by Connecticut.

Finally, the team – you know the part of all this that actually matters. I think I probably extrapolated Weeden’s averageness to the entire organization when, in reality, the secondary was spectacular, the DL was better than it’s been in years, the running backs were strong, and the receivers showed off their incredible depth (there’s no way this isn’t the deepest WR unit in the country). As for Weeden, he’ll be fine. He’s the 2nd leading passer in the nation, he threw one bad ball, had one misread route, and got a bad bounce from Josh Cooper’s facemask.

The 666 yards they put up leads all D-1 squads. This team is good. Maybe not quite top 5 good yet, but rock solid “we will line it up against anyone in the country anytime you want” good.

So my bad for overreacting, I can’t wait until they lay the wood on a wounded Arizona team.

I just wish Dana was still here so he could walk to midfield with his hands raised after shoving 55 down Mike Stoops’ throat as reciprocation for Stoops doing the same thing after Bedlam 2003.

Maybe we can get Monken to do it.