Recently I was talking Oklahoma defensive back recruiting and schematic future under Alex Grinch with Sooners Wire’s Kegan Reneau. It was sparked by this post I did on what Oklahoma and Texas will be attempting to do philosophically to stop all the potent passing attacks the Big 12 will feature in 2020. Reneau asked me … [Read more…]
In my last post, I was breaking down the challenges confronting Big 12 defenses for the upcoming 2020 season. The return of several quarterbacks combined with the growth or addition of big time weapons outside at receiver makes for a pretty frightening scenario for defenses trying to cover it all up. Within that post, I … [Read more…]
Today’s largely accepted wisdom is that you build a National Champion by recruiting the best players in the country, regardless of their location, and assembling your team out of the best of the best. Alabama started to employ that model as the Nick Saban program got going, Ohio State got there as well, and Clemson … [Read more…]
If you told me a year or two ago that Kenneth Murray was on the verge of leaving Oklahoma early in order to be drafted by the second round I would have been surprised, to say the least. He’s always been a great athlete and a willing student of the game, but the Mike Stoops … [Read more…]
Brent Venables’ Clemson Tigers defense got themselves into quite a hole against Ohio State in the playoff semifinal. The score was 16-0 midway through the second quarter and the Tiger offense was struggling to find room to breathe against the Buckeyes between a sudden rash of injuries at receiver and Ohio State’s amazing athleticism. The … [Read more…]
While breaking down Oklahoma’s prospective depth chart on defense the other day, the size and weight balance of their roster really stood out. Mike Stoops really wasn’t building a defensive roster that was friendly to a major change in approach. After his initial run at the Big 12 in 2012 where the Sooners ran a … [Read more…]
I can’t really blame Lincoln Riley for what happened in that exchange on the radio with Danny Kannell where the young Sooner coach gave the SEC some bulletin board material (however mild) by embracing the opportunity to compare playing defense in the Big 12 and doing so in the SEC. You can read the full … [Read more…]
Not all of the Ds in the second Mike Stoops era have been bad. The 2012 unit gets a bad wrap because Tavon Austin ate their hearts on primetime television… …and they had some other games in which they got torched on the ground by good spread concepts like the Baylor O, OSU, and Manziel’s … [Read more…]
I’ve spent a lot of time breaking down the state of the Oklahoma defense on this blog which should be pretty important to the story of the 2018 Big 12 season. I’m highly skeptical of the post-Mayfield Sooners in general but I’m not an insane Texas homer that think they’ll be terrible on offense with all … [Read more…]
Oklahoma was abjectly terrible on defense in 2017. I recently had a fun debate with Allen Kenney and Rufus Alexander over what went wrong and why but there wasn’t any debate over whether the defense played at an acceptable level. The 2015 Oklahoma defense was one of the better units they’ve had of late, which … [Read more…]