Does Sooner football team need to get more physical?
NORMAN — The Oklahoma football spring game arrives Saturday, and when last we saw the Sooners, they weren’t all that impressive.
Scrappy. Industrious, perhaps. But not particularly impressive. The Sooners led the Orange Bowl at halftime, though it was hard to figure how after Clemson went on to win 37-17.
The Tigers controlled both lines of scrimmage, which Bob Stoops can’t deny, and raised concerns about OU’s physicality, to which Stoops most certainly can and does object. You want to make Stoops mad and quick? Suggest his team isn’t physical.
“We’re not physical enough?
That’s bull …” Stoops said when we talked not long after the Orange Bowl. “No one’s ever physical enough. You always want to try to get more. Not that we won’t do that, too, but I don’t believe that was the case in the game.”
The Sooners have been dominated in three of four halves against Clemson the last two Decembers. That’s worrisome for OU’s future championship hopes. But the Sooners also are 7-2 the last five seasons against Florida State, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Alabama and Texas A&M. So let’s not pretend that the Sooners lie on the beach getting sand kicked in their face.
The idea is misguided that the Sooners wither in he-man football after roller skating through the Big 12’s video games.
The long-standing theory is this: the Big 12’s spread offenses require a certain type of defense. Extra defensive backs, extra linebackers. The beloved four-man front that the Stoops brothers long have embraced isn’t conducive to the techno offenses of Baylor and Texas Tech and TCU and OSU. So the Sooners have gone to the 3-4 alignment, or the 3-3-5, and it worked well enough to return the Big 12 flag to Norman in 2015.
But then comes the postseason, often against a more physical team, and those defensive speed merchants don’t come in quite as handy.
The theory doesn’t always hold. OU stood up to Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. Wore down a Tennessee team in Knoxville last September that had a 14-point lead and enough momentum to fill every rocky top in the Smoky Mountains.
Heck, Stoops won’t even sign off on Clemson’s physical superiority in the Orange Bowl, at least not with the OU defensive side. Stoops suggested the Sooners were out-athleted, not outmuscled, on the Miami Gardens turf.
“They made you miss ‘em,” Stoops said, speaking of quarterback Deshaun Watson and tailback Wayne Gallman, who combined to rush for 295 yards on 50 carries. “They spread you out, we missed some tackles.
“Are we far off? I don’t believe so. We got to the final four, up halftime, couldn’t finish. There are ways we can be better. We were a good tackling team most of the year.”
The Sooners could be going back to their roots in 2016. More 4-3 alignments. Or 4-2-5. OU is thin at linebacker. If you don’t have many linebackers, you can’t play many linebackers.
“I think we’ll become more flexible,” said defensive coordinator Mike Stoops.
Pass-rush phenom Eric Striker is gone. Striker was a unique player. A hybrid. The Stoopses built a defense around Striker’s speed and quickness, and fellow outside linebacker Devante Bond was a rare talent, too.
The ideal is to get the 11 best players on the field. If that means three safeties and two linebackers instead of two safeties and four linebackers, so be it. If that means four linemen and three linebackers, press on.
“It could change,” Mike Stoops said. “I wouldn’t be shocked if it did. If our nickel (fifth defensive back) is a better player than a sam (linebacker) … we can do a lot of different things. How we formation them, that’ll be an evolution that goes on.”
The end result could be that OU’s 2016 defense gets bigger and stronger than recent versions.
Is that an admission that the Sooners need to be more physical? I don’t know. But it should mean that OU will be more physical. And you never can be physical enough.