Lincoln Riley: As Sooners head toward the finish line, it's hard 'to think of an area we haven't made a lot of progress'
Lincoln Riley can’t quite nail it down.
Where has Riley’s Oklahoma football team shown the most progress since its last open date? Where have the Sooners made their biggest improvements since coming home from a four-overtime victory over Texas in the Cotton Bowl?
“Oh man,” Riley pondered Monday on the Big 12 coaches teleconference. “It’d honestly be tough to narrow it down. Trying to think of an area we haven’t made a lot of progress.”
The bottom line is that OU has been a more efficient football team in almost every area — quarterback play, offensive line, explosive plays from the running back position, dynamic contributions from the defensive line, consistency at linebacker and significant growth at defensive back.
Wide receiver play seems to have leveled off some. Kicker and punter haven’t been spectacular, other than Gabe Brkic’s 50-yarder last week in a blowout of Kansas. Maybe the biggest development is the return of Rhamondre Stevenson and Ronnie Perkins.
OU has now entered its final open date of the regular season with a path to the Big 12 championship game — and more improvements to make to get there.
Riley sounds encouraged that this team now can continue to make improvements — especially the less obvious ones.
“For the whole team, I think we’re becoming a much smarter football team,” Riley said. “We’ve had a lot of smart plays on tape. We’ve really been able to eliminate the majority of any — what we would classify as just a dumb or senseless penalty. In turn, we’ve played some fairly clean and quality ball. But I think it’s been kind of across the board.”
Mistakes in the early stages of the season frequently came back to haunt the Sooners. Blown leads against Kansas State and Iowa State produced two losses, and nearly did so for a third time against Texas.
In those three games, Oklahoma was outscored 69-41 in the second half, and 45-10 in the fourth quarter.
In the three games since, OU has outscored TCU, Texas Tech and Kansas by a score of 61-27 in the second half and 34-26 in the fourth quarter — the latter a product of playing freshmen and walk-ons in blowouts.
It's also worth noting that the three opponents at the front of the schedule are a lot better football teams than the three in the middle.
In any case, the last three fourth quarters have been safe because the Sooners were significantly stronger at key moments earlier in the game. They didn’t leave early opportunities on the table, so late fourth-quarter points from the opponent didn’t really matter.
“We’re finishing more plays, making less mistakes right now,” Riley said. “And because we’re doing that, we’ve given ourselves the last few weeks chances to separate from people, and we’ve been able to do it.
“So I would say all sides improving and the guys playing smarter ball, really understanding what we’re trying to do and understanding the game and the rules and understanding the rules and getting a better feel for that is probably been one of the things I’ve been most excited about during this last run.
“If we want to be the team we think we can be, it’s gonna need to (keep improving during the open date). You know, last bye week was good. We were able to get some more guys back healthy, some more guys back available to play, and we were able to do a pretty good job with COVID during that time. And so we were able to keep guys on the field, and able to… you know, got after it pretty good from a practice standpoint.
“Yeah, I mean, I think we had some momentum from the Texas win at that point. I think we were growing as a football team, and we really attacked that bye week. We had a pretty aggressive schedule, and give the players credit — they handled it well and got better throughout the week. That’s how you always want to handle them, and so we’ll have another pretty aggressive schedule here for our guys, and the expectation will be that we can handle it and really improve during this time.”
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