Sooners have never lost a same-season rematch
OU and TCU play Saturday for the Big 12 championship, exactly three weeks after the Sooners routed the Horned Frogs 38-20 on Owen Field.
Frequent rematches are relatively new to college football. I found 57 rematches in majorcollege football history, since the World War II era. Forty-eight of those rematches have come in the last 30 years. Only nine, that I found, were staged from 1943-1987.
Conference championship games are the primary reason, of course. We’ve had 33 rematches in conference title games. The history of conference title games is varied — the SEC’s started in 1992, the Big 12’s started in 1996 and was suspended after 2010 before resuming this season, the ACC’s started in 2005, the Pac-12’s and Big Ten’s in 2011, and the mid-majors started championship games in the same general time line.
Bowl rematches have become more common, too. When OU and Nebraska were rematched in the Orange Bowl after the 1978 season, it was just the seventh bowl rematch ever. But in the past 39 years, we’ve had 15 bowl rematches. The reason is obvious — many more bowl games.
Not to ruin anyone’s Friday as they count down to the 11:30 a.m. Saturday kickoff in Arlington, but of those 57 rematches, the winning team of Game 1 is just 28-28 in the rematch (there was one tie). That doesn’t sound great for the Sooners.
But OU has never lost a rematch. The Sooners beat Nebraska 31-24 in that memorable Orange Bowl, after losing to the Huskers 17-14 in November. Since then, OU has won three Big 12 title games against teams it had beaten in the regular season — Kansas State in 2000 (41-31, 27-24); Colorado (27-11, 29-7); and Missouri (41-31, 38-17).
Of course, strategy becomes different in rematches. Does the winning team use what worked the first time or figure that the losing team will be ready for that? Do you scrap your entire game plan from Game 1?
We talked with Lincoln Riley this week about those issues. Here are some of the questions:
Q: What are the advantages of disadvantages in a rematch?
Riley: “I don’t know that there’s good and bad. I just think it is what it is. You know each other better. There’s gonna be less surprises. Both teams are gonna have a better feel for each other’s personnel. You will have prepped for each team multiple weeks now. So I don’t think there will be as many surprises. You’ve still got to — it comes down to winning your individual battles and playing great team football. That’s what it’s gonna take for us to beat TCU, that’s what it’ll take for TCU to beat us. I mean, it’s two great teams going at it. Whether it’s good or bad, I guess that’s all in how you make it.”
Q: Do you anticipate TCU changes?
Riley: “I don’t know that I would sit up here and say what I anticipate. You know? It’s like any game, everybody’s got their base things, everybody’s got their wrinkles, everybody will have to make adjustments. That happened in the first game. That happens in every college football game. I’m sure this one won’t be any different.”
Q: Do you like the return of the Big 12 Championship Game?
Riley: “That’s what we’ve got to do. If they were just telling us that all of a sudden this week, we probably wouldn’t be real happy about it. But we’ve known about this for a long time. We knew it was going to come down to a championship game. All the Big 12 work in the beginning was to help to put yourself in that position, so now we are. It would be easy for me to sit there and say, look, it was dumb of us to add the championship game, we would be in right now. That would be easy for me to say. Last year, we would have loved to have it. Because we were one of those teams that were probably playing some of the best ball in the country. Would have loved to have the chance to have one more great win and maybe sneak into the playoff. It’s going to be different every year. There’s never a perfect answer. We gotta worry about ourselves and try and go play the best we can.”
Q: As a gameplanner, how do you approach a rematch? See things that work well at TCU and is that something you naturally go back to? Or do you say you can't do that again because they have a counter to that and just try a totally new game? How do you how do you balance those two extremes?
Riley: “That'll be our challenge. That'll be our challenge and I think each coach has just got to make that decision. You know, based on your team, based on what you saw on that tape and what you think will be best going forward. So that's definitely a little bit more of a dynamic in this game — some decisions there we have to make that we're not used to making when you're obviously just playing each team once a season.”
Q: Regardless of the game plan and what Gary Patterson does defensively to adjust, is your confidence level, especially in your offense, such that you don't feel it should matter? If you take care of business you will be fine no matter what see?
Riley: “I mean these guys are really, really darn good on defense. I mean, they are. And it's a challenge. When we got on a run and scored some points here, we did some things at a high level and we had some guys that made some outstanding individual plays. To sit there and think that it was easy or that it wasn't a challenge every snap is just not right. It wasn't easy then. We had to earn everything that we did. We went back and looked at it so there's a lot of things we've got to do better. I'm sure coach Patterson did the same with his group. It's going to be a battle. I am very confident in our offense but I know how good these guys are defensively. They're tremendous.”
For a friendly stroll down memory lane, here are the 57 rematches that I found, listed with the bowl game or championship game that set up the rematch: