Oklahoma's Early Season Struggles Mirror College Football as a Whole
Something just seems off to kick off the 2021 college football season.
Save maybe Georgia or Ole Miss, nobody at the top of college football looks flat out dominant through three weeks, at least not to the level we’ve grown accustomed to.
No. 3-ranked Oregon went on the road to Columbus and upset Ohio State, but the Ducks scraped by Fresno State 31-24. Clemson’s offense looked lethargic against Georgia Tech two weeks after getting shut down by Georgia.
Top-ranked Alabama rocked Miami 44-13 in Week 1, but the Hurricanes went on to beat Appalachian State by two and then get smoked by Michigan State 38-17. With the shine of their opening win gone, the Crimson Tide themselves survived a scare in the Swamp, needing to stop a 2-point conversion to hold off the Florida Gators.
Not to mention the pair of uninspiring performances that the No. 4-rated Oklahoma Sooners have carded through three weeks.
Setting aside the 76-0 demolition of FCS foe Western Carolina, the Sooners have beaten unranked Tulane and Nebraska by a combined 12 points.
While the defensive line has looked as advertised, just about every other position group save Gabe Brkic’s kicking heroics have fallen short of OU’s standard thus far.
And while the expectation was that 2021 would be a return to normalcy, Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley suggested that teams across the country may still be feeling the effects of the pandemic.
“There’s just a lot new right now,” Riley said during his weekly press conference on Tuesday. “The preparation has still been very unusual. … You don’t get last year back and all the time missed and the games missed and the practices and the time you missed with COVID. You don’t get those things back.”
Perhaps no unit has been more impacted than Oklahoma’s offensive line.
A year ago, the unit was slow out of the gates and took time to round into shape as the conditioning just wasn’t there.
Now into 2021, the Sooners are struggling to replace center Creed Humphrey and right tackle Adrian Ealy.
Anton Harrison has taken over at left tackle and Andrew Raym appears well-positioned to continue on at center after taking over against Nebraska, but the unit as a whole has underwhelmed, sending shockwaves through the entire offense.
The rocky play early against Tulane appeared to unsettle quarterback Spencer Rattler, who began to leave the pocket early and miss receivers breaking open after Rattler decided to tuck the ball and try to pick up yardage on the ground.
All of those factors have come together to form an offense that is thus far on track to be Riley’s least explosive offense since he took over as offensive coordinator.
“I think the thing is, with football, if you have bad offense and bad defense, bad defense is going to win,” Riley said. “Offensively … you have to be able to do something or even if the other side is not playing, well, it’s still going to look like good defense to the casual fan.”
It doesn’t help that defenses appear to be figuring out ways to stop the spread across the country, something Riley readily admitted on Tuesday.
“I think defensive schemes are getting more and more unique as you go through,” Riley said. “There’s a lot of good talent across college football. I guess I would say this: I don’t see as many bad defenses as I used to see, in my opinion. It just feels like the defenses have evolved and I think everybody is seeing that more widespread.
“This game always goes in cycles – tempo and RPOs – and defenses always catch up. Defenses continue to innovate. It will always be that cat and mouse game. I just think we’re in the middle of one of those cycles right now. Now, with that, we still expect to play a whole helluva lot better offensively.”
The Sooners undoubtedly have to figure out their issues. But they’re not alone in their struggles, as they appear to be endemic across all of college football.
Most importantly, OU is still unbeaten while they continue to grow as a team, and all of their goals are still on the table.
Nonetheless, something is definitely off in Norman right now, and there’s no running from that.
“Is that symptomatic nation-wide? It’s hard for me to say,” Riley said. “I do know that execution-wise, maybe the offenses are a shade behind. Maybe more than they were at this point last year. That’s not an excuse and I certainly don’t want to speak for everybody.
“You are still talking about a lot of these players who had interruptions – and a lot of interruptions – there’s a lot of new things going on right now. Literally half of our team, the first time they played in front of a full stadium was the (Western Carolina) game. It’s still a little unique right now. It just is.”
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