Defense regroups, shuts down Ohio State
COLUMBUS, OHIO — Twice in the first two games of the season, Oklahoma’s defense has faced a critical moment where things could have headed in a very bad direction.
Both times, Mike Stoops’ defense quickly regained its focus and turned in stellar performances.
In Saturday night’s 31-16 win over Ohio State, that moment came early in the third quarter.
The Sooners’ defense dominated the first half, holding the Buckeyes to just 92 total offensive yards.
Ohio State’s offense blistered Oklahoma for 132 yards on the first 11 plays of the second half, scoring one seemingly effortless touchdown and then immediately driving to the Sooners’ 7-yard line with three big running plays and a long pass on the next drive.
Then, during the replay review of J.T. Barrett’s 31-yard pass to Austin Mark that was initially ruled incomplete but changed, the defense got together once again.
“'Hold on, this is not us,'” linebacker Emmanuel Beal said of the tone of the discussion. “'Let’s play Oklahoma football. Let’s do what we know best.'
“It’s OK to take a couple chin shots, but you’ve just got to make sure to give them back.”
The Buckeyes managed just 126 yards and two field goals the rest of the way, and much of that yardage came long after the game was decided.
“Well that feels an
awful lot better than last year,” Stoops said as he sat down to take questions after the win. “It was awful exciting.”
Oklahoma’s defense kept Barrett scrambling, sacking him three times but keeping him uncomfortable regularly.
But the difference between last year’s 45-24 thumping the Buckeyes put on the Sooners and Saturday's whipping by Oklahoma was in the way OU played on the back end, Stoops said.
“That was a difference a year ago,” Stoops said. “They were able to throw balls up and just catch them. We handled things a lot better throughout the course of the game.
“This group, they’ve got a chance. There’s a lot of interesting parts to it. We have to keep messing with them.”
Stoops particularly praised sophomore Parnell Motley, calling him “the difference.”
“He met the challenge,” Stoops said. “He covered guys on the perimeter. You have to have them in this era of football.”
Because of how well the Sooners’ cornerbacks covered, the
pressure that Ogbonnia Okoronkwo and D.J. Ward in particular were able to force coming off the edges was magnified.
So when the defense came together early in the third quarter, just like it did a week earlier when UTEP drove right down the field on the opening possession of what wound up being a 56-7 win, there was an expectation that things were going to get better and quickly.
“We’ve been knowing we could play like this, we just had to put it all together,” Okoronkwo said.
“We’re really glad we did. We’re just going to use this as a template for what we can do every week and we’re going to try to keep getting better. The sky’s the limit for our defense.”