Trending Up or Trending Down? A Big-Picture Review of Oklahoma's 2021 Season
EDITOR'S NOTE: Beginning today, SI Sooners will review Oklahoma’s 2021 football season. It was an unusual season, pockmarked with high points and low. For every good turn, it seemed, lurked something bad.
After an active January in the transfer portal, the offseason began in tumult when holder Spencer Jones was caught on video picking a fight — and losing, badly — in a Norman men’s room. Three starters were kicked off the team following an alleged armed robbery and multiple felony charges. Halfway through the season, Heisman frontrunner Spencer Rattler lost his starting job to true freshman Caleb Williams, and the team played wildly inconsistent all season — a good play, a good quarter, a good game, followed by a bad one.
Finally, after a fourth-quarter collapse in Stillwater and an unceremonious end to OU’s six-year domination of the Big 12 Conference, Lincoln Riley fled under cover of darkness for the job at USC.
Over the next 12 days, SI Sooners examines OU’s season in review, including a daily report card on each position in 2021.
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Where does Sooner Nation stand on looking back at the 2021 football season?
With no conference championship, no College Football Playoff appearance and no New Year’s Day bowl game, was it a bitter disappointment?
Or considering a midseason quarterback change (to a true freshman, at that) and a head coach who had one foot out the door, was it a success?
Maybe it was something in between.
- The Sooners finished 11-2 — with victory over Oregon in the Alamo Bowl. A mixed bag.
- The Sooners started the year 9-0 for the first time since 2004 — but then lost two of their last three. Another mixed bag.
- The Sooners watched head coach Lincoln Riley bail out for a less-than-lateral move to USC — but got to relive some real nostalgia when Bob Stoops came back for a month, fixed everything and then passed the visor to Brent Venables.
- Beating Nebraska stirred the fan base in one direction. Losing to Oklahoma State spun it the other way.
- Winning so many close games early ultimately masked some underlying problems that arose during OU’s late stumbles.
Yes, 2021 is in the rearview mirror. In some cases, looking back isn’t a good thing.
Perhaps a more relevant question for Oklahoma fans as the calendar turns to 2022 is whether things at OU are trending up or trending down.
Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde, for instance — one of the nation’s most respected college football reporters, and as objective as they come — sees an overall trend downward in this Twitter post in response to a column by Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel.
Gabe Ikard, on the other hand — a former Sooner offensive lineman and a member of the OU broadcast team, in addition to his duties as a co-host on SiriusXM Satellite Radio — looks at Oklahoma as trending up since the Bedlam loss.
Forde then went on to list the litany of downward steps the program has taken since late November.
Here’s the thing: both Forde and Ikard are right. Forde comes at it from a macro perspective, a 30,000-foot view of the program, while Ikard sees everything with a much more micro view thanks to access to subtle details that only an insider knows.
To Forde’s point, this OU team was supposed to be the one that finally competed for a national championship, remember? Not finish the season in San Antonio. And absolutely, a coach jumping ship like Riley did — whatever his reasons — is a bad thing. Venables, it’s true, is 0-0 as a head coach. Losing two QBs ranked No. 1 overall in the 2019 class and the 2021 class can’t possibly be construed as a positive in any way, shape or form. And, one small adjustment: the incoming 2022 class, per 247 Sports, while still unfinished, currently ranks fifth in the SEC (one of those being Texas, which obviously isn’t a real problem).
But to Ikard’s point, Oklahoma under Venables already looks to have a tougher makeup than it did under Riley — a defensive-first mindset, a gritty, hard-edged mindset, as opposed to Riley’s 21st-century, new-age, wide-open offensive mindset. The crooked-nose, bloody-lip, swinging-fist mentality that Stoops established in 1999 slowly ebbed away and was but a memory under Riley. Venables is already bringing that back, evidenced by his hire of Jerry Schmidt as strength coach to replace Riley’s preference of Bennie Wiley.
The days of being soft, some former players have hinted, are gone.
2021 OU Report Cards
- Saturday, Jan. 8: Offensive line
- Sunday, Jan. 9: Defensive line
- Monday, Jan. 10: Running back
- Tuesday, Jan. 11: Linebacker
- Wednesday, Jan. 12: Receiver
- Thursday, Jan. 13: Cornerbacks
- Friday, Jan. 14: H-Backs
- Saturday, Jan. 15: Safety
- Sunday, Jan. 16: Special teams
- Monday, Jan. 17: Quarterback
- Tuesday, Jan. 18: Coaching
Venables has already established a new way of thinking on his coaching staff — specifically, his recruiters: a Southern way of thinking, you might say.
At Clemson, Todd Bates brought in the kind of defensive plunderers about which Riley and his staff could only fantasize. Landing other aides from Dabo Swinney’s Clemson staffroom (and, reportedly, soon to be Nick Saban’s Alabama staffroom) only fortifies Venables’ dogged pursuit of the nation’s most feared schoolboys. Venables has seen up close the kind of d-line talent it takes to win national titles. Riley could only view them from a distance.
It’s worth noting, too, that Venables, 51, is far more accomplished and far more prepared to be a head coach than Riley was when he was hired at 33.
Riley’s experience consisted of coaching receivers at Texas Tech, coordinating East Carolina’s offense and giving new life to Stoops’ Oklahoma squad for two years thanks to a generational quarterback who literally fell out of the sky. Yes, Riley has two Heisman Trophy QBs and two No. 1 draft picks on his resume, but Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray did as much or more to make Riley as Riley did to make them.
Venables has tutored under three Hall of Fame head coaches (Swinney, Stoops and Bill Snyder). His tenure at Kansas State (eight years in all) was the same duration as Riley’s tenure at Texas Tech. Venables was a full-time defensive coordinator for 18 years for two college football juggernauts, coached in eight national championship games and has two of the big trophies in his case. Riley directed offenses for seven years before Stoops handed the reins over to him.
Riley and those he took to USC have won exactly zero FBS national championships in their careers. Venables and his newcomers at OU, meanwhile, have been involved with winning seven FBS national titles. Add the strength coaches into that equation and it’s even more lopsided, as Schmidt has trained national champions at three different blue bloods.
Oklahoma in 2021 did win 11 games, but frankly struggled to put away awful teams like Tulane and Nebraska and West Virginia. The whole season just had an odd vibe to it. Something, somewhere, was off, and nobody knew what it was until Riley walked out into the California sunset wearing that USC shirt.
Was the Sunday after Thanksgiving a low point for Oklahoma football? Without question.
Has the Sooner program been trending up ever since? Absolutely.
Even the gut-punch announcement of Caleb Williams jumping into the transfer portal — completely expected (as is his eventual departure) — was quickly soothed when UCF gunslinger Dillon Gabriel pledged his transfer to Oklahoma only a few hours later.
Newton’s third law of physics teaches us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The same could be said for the last 12 months of Oklahoma football.
