Sooners to focus on upping halftime intensity
NORMAN — Oklahoma defensive tackles coach Ruffin McNeill has dozens of sayings he imparts to his teams.
They’re usually short acronyms, and they’re always catchy.
So far, his favorite — and OU’s favorite — is FIDO: Forget It and Drive On.
But recently, the Sooners have struggled to do that in the close win against Baylor and the loss to Iowa State.
With Texas on the horizon, the No. 12 Sooners know they’ve got to adjust their in-game mentality to get back on track.
“It’s about playing too tight,” quarterback Baker Mayfield said. “We haven't cut loose and just gone out and played ball yet. We've set a high standard for ourselves.
“It's not a problem, but at the same time we expect to be perfect, and I think for us that's why we might get down on ourselves a little bit too much when one bad thing
happens but at the same time you’re not going to play perfect ball every time.”
Early on, the team adhered to McNeill’s mantra, and it paid off with the win at Ohio State.
But recently, the Sooners have let the bad plays linger in their minds.
Against Baylor and Iowa State, thoughts of missed plays plagued their minds at halftime
and the intensity that was there in Columbus evaporated.
It was a complete departure from the locker room during halftime of the win against the Buckeyes.
“In Columbus, the positive attitude was that we’ve got them right where we want them,” Mayfield said of that halftime. “We had all the confidence in the world, and we felt like we’d been playing hard and we knew it was going to be all four quarters so we went out and we were ready to come out for the second half and compete the whole time.
“So comparing that to the past couple weeks, it’s like you see, ‘Oh, we didn’t play how we wanted to.’ We know we’re better than that. We get our heads down a
little bit.”
Once the negative attitude permeated the locker room at halftime of the Baylor and Iowa State games, the team couldn’t shake its firsthalf shortcomings and came out for the second half too caught up in the scoreboard instead of focusing on the next play.
To fix that mentality, coach Lincoln Riley said, the Sooners have to stop thinking about outside perceptions of their opponents.
“Everybody tells us we’re supposed to beat Baylor and Iowa State by
60, and then when it’s not happening at half, there’s and air of disappointment a little bit,” he said. “I think that’s the whole thing we’re talking about. We gotta get past that.”
Saturday’s game against Texas (2:30 p.m., ESPN) has the potential to be a season-defining moment. Everyone in OU’s locker room knows that.
That could add pressure to a team already filled with high-strung perfectionists, but Riley is urging the team to hunker down and focus on themselves.
It’s not about what went wrong against Baylor and Iowa State or by how many points they’re supposed to beat Texas.
It’s about just playing their game.
“Our expectations has got to be to do our very best, to play as hard as we possibly can all the time and not worry about the score on the scoreboard or whatever people think we should do,” Riley said. “We just gotta go be the best we can be, as corny as that sounds. That’s what we got to focus on right now.”