Topping the charts
Anderson’s running will help Murray adjust to starting role
A year after being buried on the depth chart, Rodney Anderson enters this year as the clear No. 1.
NORMAN — A year ago, Rodney Anderson was the question mark.
This time around, he’s the known commodity.
With Kyler Murray, however hyped he is and however confident Oklahoma’s coaches are in him taking over at quarterback, it helps to have a workhorse running back like Anderson ready from the get-go.
“It helps,” Sooners coach Lincoln Riley said. “It takes pressure off those guys. They don’t have to execute every single snap.”
It gives Murray time not necessarily to ease into the offense — since he’s been running it for most of the last two seasons when he was Baker Mayfield’s backup — but to work through some of the growing pains that figure to come as he adjusts to his new role.
Anderson eased into things last year, when he ran for just 34 yards combined over the first five games. Against Baylor in last season’s Big 12 opener, Anderson played but didn’t record a carry.
But Anderson insists that his feeling going into Saturday’s season opener against Florida Atlantic (11 a.m., Fox) is no different from a year ago.
That’s despite him coming off back-to-back, seasonending injuries a year ago that stunted the start of his college football career.
The neck injury that ended his 2016 season before it
even began was particularly jarring and kept him away from contact for the most part until the season began a year ago.
Now, Anderson is fully healthy and proven entering his redshirt junior year.
“I don’t really know, honestly,” Anderson said when asked if he felt different entering this season. “I’m just doing what I can for the team, I guess.”
Anderson won’t be the only running back. Trey Sermon, Marcelias Sutton and maybe even Kennedy Brooks or T.J. Pledger will get carries outside of mop-up duty.
But Anderson figures to be the workhorse after rushing for 1,079 yards and 11 touchdowns — and adding 254 yards and five touchdowns receiving — in the final eight games of last season as he climbed up the depth chart starting with a solid performance against Texas in early October.
“Knowing that you have to put pressure on a defense that way and then maybe get you some favorable looks in the throw(ing) game for guys and so it makes a big difference,” Riley said of the importance of a strong running game early in the season especially. “The play-action game is so much better. I just think it really helped Baker throughout the years.”
In 2015, when Mayfield was a first-year starter for the Sooners, his career took off when Oklahoma was able to run the ball effectively.
In the first five games of that season, the Sooners struggled to move the ball much on the ground outside of rushing for 286 yards against Tulsa in the third game of the season. In the other four games at the start of that season — including a loss to Texas — OU ran for an average of just less than 109 yards.
During a seven-game winning streak that ended the regular season that year, the Sooners used Samaje Perine and Joe Mixon to average nearly 300 yards per game on the ground as Mayfield started showing the promise that made him one of the best quarterbacks not only in Sooners history but in college football history.
“It’s hard to just sit back there and throw,” Riley said. “People are too good. Defenses are too good, especially the ones we play. It’s tough to protect, tough to read it right every single time. You’ve got to be able to take pressure off.”
This season, that responsibility of removing pressure from Murray will fall primarily on Anderson, not that he thinks much about such things.
“I don’t know,” Anderson said. “I think we’re just gonna do what we’ve always done. Whether that’s run the ball more or pass the ball more, I don’t know. That’s Coach Riley.”