Oklahoma State Defense Flips The Switch, But Not Soon Enough
Norman, Okla.– Bedlam is back, in Norman this time, and Oklahoma State took a little too long to get adjusted. Due to an explosive performance in the first quarter, the Oklahoma Sooners secured a home win 28-13.
After the Cowboys deferred to start the game, the Sooners wasted no time in scoring after the first minute and 17 seconds of the game. The next three scores happened in the first quarter as well, one of them a result of an interception by QB Spencer Sanders.
“It was fast,” explained OSU Linebacker Mason Cobb about the Sooner’s offensive tempo. “We knew they were going to go tempo, but you know, the beginning of the game is sometimes hard for defenses to get their feet in the ground, and I think that was big for us.”
The explosive first quarter on offense for OU would end there, however, as the Oklahoma State defense didn’t allow them to score for the last three quarters of the game.
In the second quarter alone, the OSU defense forced two turnovers, one was a fumble forced by CB Jabbar Muhammad and the other an interception by S Jason Taylor II.
“I think we played lights out the rest of the half, even the rest of the second quarter,” Cobb said of the improved defensive performance. “We finally got our feet in the ground, but it might’ve been a little too late.”
Coming back from halftime, the Cowboys didn’t allow OU to do much on the offensive side of the ball. Each drive for the Sooners, starting at 12:32 in the third quarter and ending with 2:48 left in the fourth quarter, resulted in a punt. That is eight consecutive drives for OU that the OSU defense forced them to punt.
“If you go into the game and you say you’re going to hold them to one of fourteen on third down, you would say you’re going to win the game,” said OSU Head Coach Mike Gundy. “But you can’t turn the ball over for four turnovers. We gave them a short field, one time was a four-yard field and the other was 32 yards and they got touchdowns out of those.”
Despite the stops and forced turnovers and momentum shifts all throughout the last three quarters of the game, the Cowboy offense is still facing the same struggles to get something going that we’ve seen over the course of the last few matchups.
“We’re struggling to run the ball and we’re struggling to protect the quarterback,” Gundy explained of the offensive woes as of late. “We just have not had a lot of luck with keeping healthy offensive linemen and not adjusting guys and moving them around. We just have to keep working at it, it’s all we can do.”
Now that OSU is out of the running for the Big 12 Championship, next weekend’s game against West Virginia doesn’t have much riding on it. Hopefully for the Cowboys, though, it should provide an atmosphere that allows them to end the season with a bang and head into the offseason with a good idea of what to improve on and what to keep the same.