It feels like I’ve spent much of the season echoing myself. More often than not, it’s been different flavors of the same disgusting casserole every week in this column. For instance, two weeks ago, I wrote this…

Folks, I’ve never been alive for a season in which Oklahoma didn’t participate in a bowl game. I’m sure many of you are in the same boat. I was in utero the last time the Sooners were sitting at home in front of the TV over the holidays.

But we are on that track right now.

You are having no fun watching it. I am having no fun writing about it. Year 3 of the Brent Venables era was supposed to be the year that it all came together, the year that Oklahoma made a statement in its first season of SEC membership.

Instead, this season has completely cratered. Mercifully, there is a win on tap this weekend (fervent knocking on wood), as the Sooners come back home for their buy game against Maine. Then they get to close out the season with Missouri, Alabama and LSU. 5-7 is not merely on the table; it’s the most likely outcome at this point.

And as my esteemed colleague Jesse Crittenden pointed out on our drive home from Mississippi, it may very well be the case that the only thing preventing the Sooners from an 0-8 debut in SEC play is the fact that Payton Thorne decided to puke all over the front of his jersey in the fourth quarter of OU’s comeback win at Auburn.

Things suck right now. There is no qualifying or sugarcoating that reality.

What more can be added to this? Oklahoma snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last night in Columbia. Amidst a display of continuous ineptitude, Drew Pyne had been booed all night by the home crowd at Faurot Field, and then the OU defense enabled him to morph into Joe Montana with the game on the line.

It is, in my humble opinion, the most inexplicable loss of a Brent Venables era that has largely been defined by inexplicable losses. Under Venables, the Sooners have handed bragging rights to teams that should have no bragging rights, ever, over a program of Oklahoma’s caliber. The Sooners lost their final Big 12 matchups with Texas Tech, Baylor, Kansas and Oklahoma State, to say nothing of the West Virginia debacle in 2022.

Now, the arguable lowlight of their first season in the SEC is a game that they gift-wrapped and handed to Eli Drinkwitz, who promptly opened his postgame presser by clowning Bob Stoops. That’s what Oklahoma has become in the year of our Lord 2024. They’re a football team around whom Eli Drinkwitz is running victory laps. A program that hangs banners for division titles just beat Oklahoma with a backup quarterback that had all of two touchdown passes in the last two years, both of which came against an Alex Grinch defense.

A season ago, 75 percent of the fanbase was of the opinion that Dillon Gabriel and Jeff Lebby sucked. Now, Gabriel is almost certainly headed to New York City next month as a Heisman finalist, and Lebby’s inaugural Mississippi State team would probably be favored over Oklahoma on neutral turf right now. Meanwhile, Oklahoma has a quarterback who went 15-of-24 for 74 yards last night, and an offensive unit that has yet to score more than two touchdowns in a game against a conference opponent.

Welcome to rock bottom. This is what it looks like.

To your questions we go.