Oklahoma Looking Under Cushions and Behind Curtains to Find Offensive Improvement

NORMAN — Oklahoma was looking for offensive solutions during the bye week.

“Like anything, when you’re not having the success you want, you’ve got to really peel it back,” Sooners coach Brent Venables said Tuesday. “Cushions up, pull the curtains back, have a lot of, again, honest, tough conversations, too, about what we need to do moving forward.”

Every bye week features some pausing and doing some internal work without the pressure of preparing for an immediate opponent.

But for Oklahoma, this one was particularly so.

The Sooners’ offensive statistics are out of a college football horror movie.

Oklahoma is 131st nationally in rushing yards per game, with only Cal, Stanford and Arkansas behind them among power conference teams.

The Sooners are 127th in first downs per game, 120th in total offense, 109th in third-down offense, and 109th in points per game.

Not much has gone right for Oklahoma’s offense, and solutions need to come quickly.

The Sooners’ starting offense worked plenty against the starting defense last week to try to find something that works as they enter a grueling eight-games-in-eight-week stretch with a 2:30 p.m. Saturday showdown against No. 1 Texas.

“It felt like fall camp vibes again,” defensive end Taylor Wein said of squaring off against Oklahoma’s offensive line. “Going back to our fundamentals. They’re looking really good, they’re getting more healthy and establishing a DNA.”

The Sooners have been through this before.

Two seasons ago, they entered the bye week the week before the Red River Shootout scrambling offensively.

Injuries had wiped out their wide receiver room in particular and neither Jackson Arnold nor Michael Hawkins Jr. could seize the reins of the starting quarterback spot.

It didn’t go well that time, as Oklahoma put up just 237 yards of total offense in a 34-3 loss to the Longhorns. A week later, Hawkins had about a disastrous start as could be drawn up in an eventual 35-9 home blowout at the hands of South Carolina and Seth Littrell was fired afterward as offensive coordinator, opening the door for Ben Arbuckle to join Venables’ staff the next season.

Now, it’s Arbuckle who might be coaching for his job.

“With the extra week, there’s a couple different roads that you could go down,” Arbuckle said. “You could definitely look at it as that: Are we gonna add a whole lot of new stuff? Or are we going to dissect what we’ve been really good at and try to build off that and then maybe build off what we’ve struggled with to try and get better at it?”

Of course, Arbuckle wasn’t about to give up any piece of the Sooners’ offensive game plan, though he certainly sounded like a coach with a few hidden cards up his sleeve.

But trick plays and narrowly focused changes to the playbook can only take you so far.

Oklahoma needs significant improvement — especially when it comes to blocking, running the ball and avoiding turnovers — to have a chance to not only compete with the top-ranked Longhorns on Saturday but also to have success throughout the rest of the SEC schedule.

“We’ve been under a lot of pressure,” Venables said. “We need to apply the pressure and get back to what I know we’re capable of, offensively speaking. Everybody took the opportunity to improve, get better, gain some confidence through the week. And we’re getting there.”

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