JUST ONE OF THE GUYS
Mayfield, Sooners ready for rematch vs. TCU
NORMAN — Six years to the day after Baker Mayfield last lined up against a team that he’d played earlier in the season, Oklahoma’s quarterback will get a chance to recreate those results.
This time, the stakes are slightly higher.
Saturday, it’ll be Mayfield leading the way for the No. 4-ranked
Sooners against No. 12 TCU (11:30 a.m., Fox) in the Big 12 Championship Game.
In 2011, Mayfield led Lake Travis (Texas) High School to a 14-9 win over Cedar Park in the fourth round of the Class 4A playoffs.
Less than a month earlier, Mayfield quarterbacked the Cavaliers to a 24-21 regularseason win over Cedar Park. “It’s always harder playing somebody the second time because you see exactly what they wanted to exploit and you have to fix and work on those things in the meantime,” Mayfield said. “For us, it’s about adjusting on the fly. We’re gonna have our base game play and so will they.
“Then when you play
someone for the second time, it’s about in-game adjustments and the most physical team is gonna win. You’re gonna be ready game-plan wise. There’s gonna be people in the perfect spots. It’s about winning your individual battles and matchups.”
It’ll be a first for Sooners coach Lincoln Riley.
“It’s two different games,” Riley said. “Nothing from the first one is gonna matter. They were
a really, really good team when we beat ’em here and they’re still a really, really good team. You’re gonna have to play really well to beat ’em. We realize that.”
TCU’s Gary Patterson hasn’t had the experience of a rematch as a head coach, either.
In the first meeting between the teams, Nov. 11, the Sooners jumped out to a 24-point lead by halftime before grinding things out in the second half on their way to a 38-20 win.
Mayfield had 333 yards and three touchdowns through the air. TCU quarterback Kenny Hill threw
for 270 and a score.
Sooners defensive coordinator Mike Stoops expects Patterson to have several wrinkles offensively.
“We’ve got to look at things that have given us some problems,” Stoops said, referencing the rematch. “The wildcat has given us some problems the last two times. Kansas State wasn’t, but it was kind of a lot of the similar — you saw a lot of the power plays into the middle part of our defense, and that’s something we haven’t defended very well.”
It’ll be Oklahoma’s first rematch during the same season since 2007, when it beat Missouri 41-31 in the regular season and then the Tigers again, 38-17, in the Big 12 title game.
During the original run of the Big 12 Championship Game, the Sooners three times met a team they’d faced in the regular season. All three times, Oklahoma followed a regular-season win with a repeat performance in the title game.
In addition to the wins over Missouri, the Sooners beat Colorado twice in 2002 and Kansas State twice in 2000.