Sooners keep emotions in check after win
As soon as J.T. Barrett completed a final pass and the clock ran out Saturday night, Oklahoma players broke out in huge grins on the turf of Ohio Stadium.
With OU’s 31-16 win solidified, the players hugged each other and ran off the field, collecting in front of the throng of Oklahoma fans hanging over the railings of the end zone.
Some high-fived and headed into the locker room, while others jumped around before joining quarterback Baker Mayfield at the midfield logo for a flag-plant and an impromptu mosh-pit celebration fitting of a national championship win.
But this wasn’t the title game. This was the second week of the season, and the title game is four months away.
This isn’t where No. 2 Oklahoma’s season is supposed to peak.
“We’ll be disappointed if this is the highlight of our season,” coach Lincoln Riley said afterward. “We’ve played two games
and have a long ways to go.”
Riley carried that attitude into OU’s weekly news conference, spending all of a minute and a half recapping Saturday night’s win in his opening statement Monday.
Then, it was on to Tulane. Did the 31-16 thumping of Ohio State deserve more than 90 seconds?
Sure, and there would be plenty of time for questions about the Sooners’ statement in Columbus, but Riley was making a point.
“We’ve won two games, you know?,” he said. “We’ve had success in two games. That’s great. We appreciate it. We’re happy about it. But there’s so much more to go. We’ve got some good leaders. We as a staff will do a good job of keeping it in perspective, and know we’ve got a long way to go to get where we want to go.”
Riley is fighting off his team’s potential complacency by reviewing plenty of game film and correcting the Sooners’ mistakes from Saturday. Though OU (2-0) earned a solid win, it was far from a flawless performance.
“We’ve just got to focus on the things we have to do to get better as a team,” Riley said. “There’s a lot of good the other night. The best part about it just being the overall mentality of the team.
“But like any game, you go back and watch the film and there’s so much more we didn’t do well enough, and we’ve got to get better at, so we’ve still got to keep our goal in perspective and know that we haven’t reached any of those yet and we still have a long ways to go.”
While the veterans on the team like senior fullback Dimitri Flowers understand the importance of maintaining a singular focus on the upcoming Tulane game, keeping the newcomers just as grounded might prove more challenging.
That’s where the leadership of those older guys comes in.
“We have to take each game one week at a time,” Flowers said. “That’s
what we’ve been doing. That’s what we’ve been preaching the last couple of seasons. Today’s Monday, and everything starts over with Tulane.”
They’ve experienced a similar situation before, using the double overtime win in Tennessee as a solid foundation for an eventual College Football Playoff berth in 2015. Immediately after beating the Volunteers, OU defeated Tulsa by 14 points and West Virginia by 20.
To Mayfield, the key in staving off the big-victory hangover is keeping the game preparation consistent. Tulane’s football team (1-1) isn’t the same caliber as the No. 8 Buckeyes, but that shouldn’t cause the Sooners to adjust their routine.
“It was something that we talked about on the ride home, some of the leaders, that we need to prepare like that every week,” Mayfield said. “We need to treat every game like it’s the last one we have, like we need it. That’s a good mentality to have, just block out everything else and prepare like nobody else believes in us. Just go to work.”