Oklahoma's Defense Focusing on Improving Communication to Eliminate Busts
NORMAN — Widespread changes are not coming to the Oklahoma defense.
The past two weeks, the Sooner defense has given up a combined 96 points and 1,177 total yards to the Kansas State Wildcats and the TCU Horned Frogs.
Unable to stop the bleeding, Brent Venables’ team has fallen to 3-2 during his first season in charge.
Oklahoma’s defensive woes took an extra turn for the worse in Fort Worth, as a number of coverage busts allowed the Horned Frogs to break off four plays of over 60 yards.
As the game wore on against TCU, OU linebacker DaShaun White said he noticed less and less communication between the defense on the field, something that could have contributed to the mental errors that led to the massive chunk plays.
“It was something that just can’t happen,” White said after practice on Tuesday. “We’ve got to be consistent throughout the entire game with our communication.
“And there’s a lot of times, like sometimes — nobody’s perfect, you know. Somebody might ask you — I know there’s a few instances in my case where maybe hurry up, tempo, tempo and I maybe didn’t get the call and I’ve got to communicate with (David Ugwoegbu). Or Trey Morrison, Billy (Bowman), that sort of thing. It’s just one of those things where we’ve got to take care of each other.”
Defensive coordinator Ted Roof said the egregious busts weren't the product of new calls from the first few weeks of the season.
"We don’t have any coverages where we let guys get behind us like that," Roof said. "We don’t design coverages like that. Mistakes happen. It was a mistake. Things that can’t happen that we have to get corrected."
Venables puts a large emphasis on each player understanding what the entire defensive play call is trying to accomplish, not just each person’s individual role or responsibility.
Those communication breakdowns can’t happen if the defense is going to operate on the same page, and the coaching staff has been working to ensure it won’t be an issue this Saturday against Texas.
“We've been emphasizing that every day with the two losses,” safety Justin Harrington said Tuesday. “There's never enough communication. If there's extra to get the call out or get the call to the boundary corner, so be it. We have to make it happen. There's never enough communication.”
But getting the play call in is only half the battle.
OU has also had widespread breakdowns in technique the past two weeks that have contributed to the poor defensive play.
“The byproduct needs to be better. All of it,” Venables said on Tuesday. “You know, if you have a certain scheme that requires a bail technique, a technique that goes with the scheme, then you’ve gotta execute the scheme. You can’t forget. So you gotta do a better job of emphasizing it as a coach.
“Doing it again and again and again and again. You can’t get bored with that. In a pressure situation you have to have the poise to execute. Little things like that, they lead to big things, as we know.”
Part of being able to execute boils down to having confidence in technique, allowing players to react to what they’re seeing in front of them as quickly as possible.
So while the coaching staff is trying to make adjustments, they’ve also been mindful of needing to help rebuild the confidence of the defense along the way.
On the practice field, that belief comes in the form of continuing to hone in on the mistakes over and over until it becomes second nature. It’s a process that takes time, something the Sooners don’t have if they’re going to get the season back on track, but still the defense isn’t skipping those steps to improvement.
“The more you rep something, the more confident you are just doing your job, knowing where you’re supposed to be,” White said. “Knowing where the people around you are supposed to be is a really big thing to play at a high level. That’s kind of where we are right now.
“We’re trying to get a lot of guys to just understand their job and the jobs of the guys around them so they can just play with a better level of anticipation.”
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