Why Oklahoma OL Eddy Pierre-Louis Says Beating Texas is ‘Very Urgent’

Since joining the SEC, Oklahoma has struggled against its biggest foe.

The Sooners have lost the last two installments of the Red River Rivalry, most recently falling 23-6 to Texas in 2025.

Redshirt sophomore offensive lineman Eddy Pierre-Louis has yet to be on the roster for a win against the Longhorns. The Sooners fell 34-3 against Texas in 2024 before their 17-point defeat a year ago.

This year, the Sooners and Longhorns will square off at the Cotton Bowl on Oct. 10 — and Pierre-Louis knows how important it is for OU to break its recent skid.

“It is going to be very urgent,” Pierre-Louis said at SEC Media Days in Tampa, Fla., on Monday.

Oklahoma and Texas have met 121 times, and the Longhorns lead the all-time series 65-51-5. The Sooners won five of six meetings from 2016 to 2021, but under Brent Venables, OU is 1-3 against Texas.

The Red River Rivalry obviously means so much to the program and the state of Oklahoma as a whole. And considering their recent struggles against the Longhorns, it’s imperative for the Sooners to get back into the win column.

But Pierre-Louis isn’t viewing the Texas game as more important than the other 11 contests on OU’s schedule.

“It is one game at a time,” Pierre-Louis said.

Pierre-Louis isn’t wrong for treating every game equally — the Sooners’ 2026 slate is a gauntlet.

Oklahoma will battle three teams — Georgia, Ole Miss and Texas A&M — that reached the College Football Playoff in 2026. Texas narrowly missed out on the playoff last year, and so did Michigan, which will host Michigan in Week 2. And while Missouri, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky and South Carolina weren’t CFP contenders last year, there are no “off weeks” in SEC play.

That’s where the month of practice before the regular season comes in.

“Fall camp is where we gel up all our pieces together because we have really good pieces for the offense, defense, special teams, wherever,” Pierre-Louis said. “And this is where we're going to gel ourselves in for these next couple weeks. That's going to help set us forward for these next three to four months, however it is, and help us get the job done.”

Pierre-Louis described last year’s loss to Texas as “very frustrating.” That’s a fair assessment of the game that marked OU’s second year in a row failing to score a touchdown against the Longhorns.

But it wasn’t the Sooners’ only defeat.

OU also lost a regular-season game against Ole Miss before losing to Alabama in the CFP nearly two months later. In each of the Sooners’ three losses last year, Pierre-Louis said the team “fell short in a couple categories.”

Pierre-Louis believes the sting of those defeats — along with the Sooners’ preparations in fall camp — will allow them to defeat the Longhorns, as well as the other 11 opponents on the schedule.

“Each and every day, we just have to continue to keep going back to the details,” Pierre-Louis said. “Go back to the basics and keep working on those key things that made us lose games and work on those things to continue to help us improve.”

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