Tilting at Windmills

It was the unspeakable unmetionable that nobody wanted to say. It was the most obvious “what-if” nightmare scenario and it showed up in a crumpled heap on the floor of Cowboys Stadium right before halftime Saturday night.

The entire season is in that sling.

Slingin’ Sam Bradford became Sam-in-a-sling when he landed hard on his throwing shoulder just after passing fellow Sooner Heisman winner Jason White for the all-time passing record at Oklahoma. You could feel and hear 90 percent of a 74,000+ crowd gasp a collective “oh shit” as Sam lay writhing on the Jerryworld turf.

Up to that point, Bradford wasn’t looking great, but he sure wasn’t bad: he was efficient and making good reads, but wasn’t able to take enough time to go through all of his progressions and hit the downfield balls he was used to completing to Iglesias and Gresham. The real problem was an offensive line that looked like they had all been moved over from tight end, rather than just Eldridge who was needed more as a backup starting center than as a backup starting tight end.

So, what went right and what went wrong? A little and dear lord, where should we start.

The Good

OU’s defensive line. BYU’s Max Hall might have gone Leach on the OU secondary in the first half, but it wasn’t for lack of line push. He was able to pick apart a soft middle on short drops before anybody could get to him. In the second half when the Sooners needed something big from the defense to help out a struggling offense, Gerald McCoy and Jeremy Beal were huge. McCoy literally took over one series. The coaches must have thought so, too, because McCoy signaled to come out after getting gassed from making just bout every play in the series, but everybody on the sidelines looked like they were texting Sergio Kindle the number of a good DWI attorney instead of looking at the field.

Travis Lewis is playing like a Butkus finalist already. Whenever the defense needed a play, Lewis was there. He finished with 13 tackles and was a force all night.

Ryan Reynolds. You’ll see him mentioned again, but here we’ll cite him for playing very well as long as the play was run or thrown right at him. He was part of a big push up the middle (along with McCoy) that limited BYU to 28 yards on 33 carries. He also made some nice jujitsu moves after his interception, but the fear was that he’d blow a non-existent knee while juking air.

Brandon Caleb. In his first significant action of his career, Caleb was OU’s best receiver on the field, catching 4 balls for 57 yards.

Tress Way. You know it’s a bad night when you cite the punter for a good game, but after a shaky WTF start in the first half, Way was booming kicks after halftime. The bad part was he had to punt seven times.

What went wrong

Again, where to start. The most glaring and obvious place is in the offensive line. With apologies to the Fiesta Bowl fiasco against West Virginia, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Stoops unit so ill-prepared and undisciplined. The OL had three (3) false starts on the first series of the game with right tackle Cory Brandon logging two of his four on the night. Those are Flozell fucking Adams numbers. Brandon was also flagged twice for holding. The glass half full thought there is well, at least he waited for the fucking snap count on those plays.

Brandon might need some of Schmitty’s motivational techniques.

Brandon’s death knell was his last false start of the game on OU’s final drive, pushing the inexperienced Landry Jones back into a 3rd and 14 from unmakeable field goal range. Which dovetails into …

Coaching. Nevermind that there’s not a single person on the roster trusted to kick a field goal past 45 yards (and even that’s stretching it). The decision to send out Way was almost an act of desperation, as if to say that the chances of him making that were greater than the freshman QB converting a fourth and long. I vehemently disagree and I’m not alone. There’s at least a chance of making that fourth down. With all apologies to whoever the fuck wants an apology, there’s zero chance OU is making that field goal this year.

Ryan Reynolds. In a footrace between a sloth, a chunk of granite and Ryan Reynolds, #4 is taking silver. It took BYU exactly half a series to figure out OU couldn’t cover anybody over the middle. Granted, it’s not Reynolds’ fault: the guy literally has no knees, so expecting him to cover even slow, 26-year-old Mormon missionary-returnees is asking a little much. In fact, the Cougars rarely threw outside the hash marks, knowing that they’d be wide open with YAC downfield between the tackles. Which brings us back to …

Coaching. The upside with Brent Venables is he can coach linebackers like nobody’s business. See: Curtis Lofton, Rufus Alexander, Teddy Lehman, Rocky Calmus, Torrance Marshall, Lance Mitchell and Travis Lewis. The downside is that Venables suckles at the teat of three linebackers on the field no matter the down, the distance, time on the clock or day of the week. Venables was a hot commodity not too long ago with head coaching vacancies around the country and can we honestly say OU is better off with people failing to hire him away? I realize that we at TaW are just some hack bloggers who paid $80-100 to see the game, $30 to park and $8.50 for a fucking hot dog, but it doesn’t take a resume littered with Butkus winners and Big 12 Defensive Players of the Year to see that Ryan Reynolds can … not … cover … anybody … over … the … fucking … middle. Whither Mike Stoops.

Inconclusive

Landry Jones. The worst you can point out about Landry is that horrible growth is above his lip. Landry, do something before you start looking like this:

Jackie Treehorn still hasn't paid him his royalties.

No, Landry didn’t look great. He looked like a redshirt freshman on national TV who had no clue he was going to be called upon. He did not look like Sam Bradford, which isn’t his fault whatsoever. He also didn’t have time to look through any reads at all unless Brandon was bear-hugging his man. Landry needs to grow up in a hurry, though. He’ll get some good scrimmage time against Idaho State while we learn more about the extent of Sam’s injury.

Final analysis

It didn’t just look ugly: it was ugly. It wasn’t even butterface ugly where the chick might be marginal above the neck, but displays such a nice rack that you can kind of overlook it. The Sooner defense, for all of its pass coverage flaws, was opportunistic and able to hold BYU to 14 points. Anytime you do that to a MWC team, you should win. Obviously, the Sooners desperately need Bradford to summon the regenerative healing powers of Wolverine, pop his shoulder back in like Detective Murtock Riggs and be ready for Miami. Jermaine Gresham returning immediately, if not sooner, will also help Landry immensely.

Right now, all we can do is wait and hope. If Sam’s injury is as they say (A/C joint sprain – I don’t even know what the hell that means) and it’s 1-3 weeks, it could give the OL time to gel and give Brandon enough soap-in-a-sock treatments that the Sooners could turn this around. If Bradford’s injury is more severe and he’s out for an extended period of time, start making your plans for San Antonio and be thankful.

Statistics are a wonderful tool for evaluating Red River Rivalry folklore. Of course, statistics have to be placed into proper context — remember the Benjamin Disraeli phrase on the progression of untruths ("lies, damned lies, and statistics"). So with fidelity as our goal and a proper context as our method, let’s utilize recent stats to assess three often discussed RRR lore.

(1) First, the Player Myth.

The Longhorn assertion is that Colt McCoy is much better than Sam Bradford under pressure. Let's compare the facts for McCoy and Bradford's performance while their team is behind.

Cumulative Statistics for 2007 & 2008 Seasons passing statistics during periods UT/OU is behind
metric	Colt McCoy	Sam Bradford
attempts	262	115
completions	173	76
interceptions	12	4
percentage	66.0%	66.1%
passing yds	2122	851
passing tds	12	7
QB rating	140.0	141.3

The Verdict: So while the Longhorns may assert that McCoy is much better than Bradford under pressure, the facts give a different picture. Bradford actually has a slightly higher rating and makes fewer mistakes during periods while his team is behind.

(2) Second, the Coach Myth.

A second Longhorn assertion is that Longhorn defensive coordinator, Will Muschamp, produces defenses that are much more effective than his Oklahoma counterpoint, Brent Venables. Given UT's proclivity to schedule out-of-conference foes like Saint Martha's Girl School for the Blind, some normalization is required to set a consistant context. We therefore consider defensive production versus opponents ranked by the Associated Press.

Defensive Production from the 2008 Season (against AP ranked teams)
metric	Will Muschamp	Brent Venables
Games	5	7
Scoring Def/game	30.0	26.0
Rushing Yds/game	120.6	128.9
Passing Yds/game	310.8	266.9
Total Yds/game	431.4	395.8
Interceptions	3	10
Fumbles	4	9
Sacks	15	18
QB Hurries	15	13
Passes Broken Up	19	26

The Verdict: The reality is Venables 2008 defense outproduced Muschamp's 2008 defense.

(3) Third, the Zebra Myth.

Our last category concerns those titans of the tundra — those field marshals with hawk-like vision and impeccable impartiality who preside over the game. The Sooner assertion is that OU regularly gets hosed in the RRR. Longhorns are not without complaint themselves (e.g., any Longhorn will instantly cite the very questionable 15 yarder "running into the punter" penalty from 2008), but every year it seems like an Austin-based crew throws more head-scratcher flags against OU (e.g., even the ABC commentators chided the two personal fouls called on OU as McCoy went out of bounds).

In a modern-era football contest between two evenly matched teams, the referee has arguably more potential to determine the outcome of a game than either coach or player — just ask Pac10 referee Gordon Reese. Penalties can slow down the most efficient offense or weaken the most dominating defense. Penalties do more than change field position; they result in lost timing, in added stress, in momentum shifts.

The NCAA website has archived statistics going back to 2000. During those 9 seasons, OU averaged slightly fewer penalty yards per game than UT (56.66 yards per game versus 59.09 yards per game). Unfortunately for OU, the Sooners' penalty yardage dramatically increases during Red River Rivalries to 69.89 yards per RRR game. During the same 9 year period, UT averaged 63.56 penalty yards per RRR game.

Nine samples is marginal for making any kind of statistical observation. But using the excellent database at SoonerStats.com, one can make observations over longer periods. Over the last 20 RRR matches, OU exceeded their average penalty yards 14 times. Furthermore, while OU's seasonal average was 59.49 yards per game over the last 20 games, the Sooners' RRR average was 73.20 yards per game (an increase of +23%!). Soonerstats does not have UT's entire season averages, but we can determine UT's RRR average for the same 20-year timespan and for that annual contest UT averaged 63.56 yards per game (about 10 yards per game less than OU). Interesting.

The Verdict: OU's penalty yardage shows a measurable increase in Red River Rivalries, and OU is consistently more penalized than UT in Red River Rivalries.

Aviation.com recently named their top 10 warplanes of all time. Sure, they included the P51 Mustang and the German Fokker Biplane, but amongst these iconic figures of history and cinema was a somewhat surprising selection — the USSR's Mikoyan MiG-21. You remember the MiG-21 — exposed rivets, vacuum tubes, and limited (if any) exotic metals. Certainly it was a favorite of Eastern bloc countries due to its low production costs, but how could you include it in the same list as the Boeing F-18 Hornet? The simple answer is it was very successful in realizing its goals. Given the reality of Soviet manufacturing imperfections and inherent variability from a workforce often working to a vodka buzz, the MiG-21 achieved consistent execution without compromising performance.

The MiG-21 and the F-18 Hornet were designed with different "engineering tolerances". While the MiG-21 would never reach the performance levels of the F-18, it was able to achieve "good enough" performance when conditions, manufacturing properties, and raw materials varied significantly. In a similar manner, a Ford F-150 pickup may never reach the performance levels of a Ferrari F430, but a Ford F-150 can drive through an off-road stream two feet deep and continue on with a couple of sparkplugs completely fouled. The fussy Ferrari either purrs or sleeps, there is little allowance for poor parts and poor tuning.

Moving on to football, its possible to design a high performance defense where each player has a role that is unforgiving. In such a defense, the tuned performance is able to suffocate even the most deadly offense (think Texas Tech's offense of 2008, or Missouri's offense of 2007). The downside for the high performance defense is that, like the Ferrari and the F-18, most of its engineering tolerances are quite stringent: a missed tackle or lining up incorrectly can have grievance consequences. This approach is the polar opposite from the yielding "bend but don't break" philosophy that intentionally gives everyone a certain amount of freedom and asks others to help cover up any gaffes caused by "failed improvising".

#38 could definitely fly.

So which is the best defense for today’s college landscape? You would be hard-pressed to find a more successful defense than the “high performance” Stoops/Venables defenses at Oklahoma. A quick look at the relevant statistics make it clear that this defensive style is hard to surpass. It has produced two Butkus award winners, one Lombardi award winner, two Thorpe award winners, and two Nagurski award winners. More impressive, the defense has surrendered an average of just 18 points per game. With an emphasis on making offenses one-dimensional, Sooner defenses have allowed opponents less than 100 yards rushing in 71 of Stoops’ 133 Games. And when the Sooners allow opponents to rush for fewer than 100 yards, the team’s record is 67-4. Sooner defenses have also recorded 9 shutouts during the Stoops/Venables years.

If there is a downside to the Stoops/Venables defense, it’s probably found in its unforgiving nature. Surely you recall the 2008 Red River Rivalry. With the starting lineup, OU held UT to a one-dimensional offense relying totally on the passing game. (Stoops is 4-0 against UT when holding them to under 100 yards rushing.) However, when the injury bug took out starting MLB Ryan Reynolds and forced in a substitute with very little experience, the unforgiving nature of the high performance defense required too much of Reynold’s substitute. With the substitute MLB, UT’s offensive production changed dramatically:

The necessary work in keeping the planned personnel in tip-top form probably precludes giving sufficient real repetitions to under-personnel, hence the dilemma of the high performance defense — it yields high performance with the planned personnel, but may yield a high drop-off with an unplanned substitute. Like so many things in life, it's a calculated roll of the dice, a game of chance with the injury bug. And as the writer of Ecclesiastes once mused "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor satisfaction to the wise, nor riches to the smart, nor grace to the learned. Sooner or later bad luck hits us all. No one can predict misfortune."

As 120 FBS teams prepare for the upcoming 2009 season, each defensive coordinator is assessing his defensive strategy, his "engineering tolerances". Will it be better to aim for the high-performance side of the spectrum, or better to aim for the bend-but-don't-break side of the spectrum? Personally, I much prefer the high performance defense to other "safe" choices. Better to strive for greatness than settle for mediocrity.

A crowd of over 25,000 gathered in Norman for the OU Red-White Spring game. Many, like me, paid $10 to watch a glorified practice. But we do it because we know there won’t be OU football for 4 months and because we have no social life. So my lonely friends and I gathered at GFOMS to see what was going to happen and to look for things to worry and fret about. Before the actual scrimmage there was a flag football game played by several OU alums. I didn’t make it in time and didn’t hear much discussion about, but apparently Snorter Luster saw it.

The pregame coin toss group was joined by honorary captains Jamelle Holieway, Tony Casillas, Lydell Carr and Brian Bosworth. The team with the highest number of honorary captains with DUIs got to call the toss. The scoring system for the Red-White game was created by a combination of test lab monkeys on acid and the International Finance Department from the Price School of Business. I’ll admit up front I’m not sure what the final score was, but the white team (defense) won.

Casillas and Boz were there to show off their rings.

Initially the first team offense went against the first team defense. Jermaine Gresham, Matt Clapp, Brody Eldridge, Chris Brown and DeMarco Murray did not play but Sam Bradford did … for 3 series. Madu started in the slot and Justin Johnson started at TB. OU never ran the I-formation today and the schemes were very vanilla. It was a hurry up offense, but mostly hurry up and punt. Stephen Good was also sidelined, and Brian Lepak started in his place. He spent most of the day diving at DE’s and DT’s who ran by him. It was not a good day for the walk-on transfer from Colorado State. After a few plays the red team was forced to punt. Tress Way lost the coin toss so he was elected to punt today. His first few efforts were very poor, although I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and dismiss it as first game jitters from a redshirt frosh.

Landry Jones led the 2nd team offense against the 2nd team defense. Very quickly the young LB’s Franklin, Wort and Bird stood out. Javon Harris also got the call at safety for the #2′s. Jermie Calhoun was the #2 RB and he did show occasional bursts, but spent most of his time stopping short of the line and looking for a hole. Given the quickness of the OU defense, that was not a good idea.

For most of the first quarter (or for most of the game actually), the defensive line controlled the trenches. Bradford found himself under more pressure today than he had all of last year, but still stepped up to hit Brandon Caleb with a nice slant and followed it with a nice TD pass to Adron Tennell. Brian Jackson was the victim on both of those plays. J.R. Bryant and Mike Balogun got the start at LB with the #1′s, and Bryant was all over the field. He seems to be a little small and does get lost in traffic, but going downhill or side to side he is very effective. He appeared to separate the shoulder of TE Trent Rattaree on one vicious tackle. OU’s LB depth is absurd at this point. Brent V must be thinking he has died and gone to LB heaven and I’m sure he is scheming some way to get 11 linebackers on the field at one time.

Looks like Pooh has shaken off the injuries.

Drew Allen got work as the #3 QB and then began alternating with Landry as Bradford took a seat with 3 minutes left in the 1st quarter. Landry threw a pass to a stumbling Madu which was intercepted and returned for a TD by Dom Franks. Franks got 2 oskies on the day and appears to be our best CB right now, although Jackson was solid. The quarter ended with Donald Stephenson getting a couple of holding penalties. The LTs for the offense struggled all day as the DEs were just too quick.

Drew Allen was mostly ineffective today. He does show a good arm, but it seemed at times that he was going for the home run and not progressing through his reads. Jones was much steadier, although it is apparent it will take time for the rust to fall away. The second quarter was a hodge podge of bad blocking and impressive defense, although like most callers on the post game show, I’m not convinced the Oline is only a step above the band’s drumline in keeping people off the OU QBs. The blocking schemes in the scrimmage are very limited, and the offense was handcuffed by not having the big play weapons available. Also, the OU defense is pretty darn good.

Halftime was filled with the passing of the microphone to a long line of alums who had returned for the game. Most of their comments were muffled, but I know of one alum from the 1946 class who attended. Curtis Lofton, Jammal Brown, the Boz, Casillas, and Kent Bradford were a few of the notables who returned. And there was even another appearance on Owen Field by Bubba Moses. You know there is only 1. Dean Blevins got a smattering of boos and some light applause from the crowd. I’m not a fan of Dean’s, but it was rather sad.

The second half was fairly non-eventful. There was another nice oskie by Franks, a fumble forced by Jeremy Beal which was returned for a TD by J.R Bryant and some bad punting by Tress Way. On one occasion following a poor punt, Bob Stoops chewed on Way for a solid minute before shaking his head and turning away.

So, were questions answered today? Probably not. I don’t put a lot of stock in these games, but do think they serve some guide on individual players. When John (Finding) Nimmo throws what was the best pass of the 2nd half I remind myself that this is a game played to give guys like him a chance, but not a game to draw final conclusions on a team or player. Last year Sam Bradford struggled mightily in the Red White game. But he had a decent fall don’t you think?

I’ll close with some final thoughts, but this is just what I saw today. It doesn’t mean that these are trends or ultimate conclusions on the makeup of this team.

1. The Oline needs work. Habern was solid at center and probably had the best day of any of the linemen. The LT’ struggled against the quick DEs, but those DEs ARE quick so that can be forgiven.

2. We didn’t learn much about the receivers except that Broyles is the best one and Tennell is good when healthy. Madu at the slot has potential, but if Brown or Murray go down he needs to be back at the tailback slot. He is superior to Calhoun and Johnson right now. I can’t comment on their WR blocking at all, and I give an “incomplete” to Owens and Miller.

3. Our LB’s are good. Period.

4. Special teams are an issue. Again. Bob said after the game that Tress was nervous and that he has looked better in practice than he showed today. Of course, we heard the same things about the Hobbit Stevens last year so I’m not so sure that is good. Kickoff coverage was a non-issue today because the return game was never practiced. However, Way kicked off and his kicks were not very good. Hopefully the kid coming from Norman North can fill that role.

5. There were a LOT of recruits there today. In fact, an entire lower section was roped off for them and their families. I wasn’t able to get close enough to see who was who or measure vertical leaps so I’ll leave that discussion to others.

6. It was a good day. Nice weather, surrounded by Sooner fans, watching football on Owen Field. Yes, it was a good day.