Team 128: Put to the test
Oklahoma has headed into the Red River Showdown with Texas with two losses before. You don’t even have to go that far to find recent examples.
OU was 2-2 heading into the 2016 edition, and 1-2 going into the RRS in 2020. Both times OU’s back was against the wall, and both times, the Sooners responded. A 45-40 win six years ago, and an epic 53-45 4OT victory two Octobers ago.
In 2022, though, with Team No. 128 as first-year head coach Brent Venables has labeled so often, this feels a whole lot different.
There were mistakes and errors in those previous years, but never to a point where it felt like the heart, soul and toughness of the team has been questioned.
If you’re not taking a strong look in the mirror as a Sooner player after OU’s embarrassing 55-24 defeat at TCU last weekend, then it’s never going to happen.
And with all the negativity and questioning of the manhood of this group, no better time to take out all those frustrations than Saturday at the Cotton Bowl against a familiar foe.
“Oh yeah, definitely,” wide receiver Marvin Mims said. “If you're scared, if you don't want to go out there, don't go out there. This game maybe means more to me, being a kid from Texas. This is a game that you sign up for. You have it circled every year.
“You go to OU, you go to Texas, you know you are going to play OU-Texas. You know what it means, being in the state fair, all that stuff. At the end of the day, if you're not fired up to play this game, you don't love football. You don't want to play football.”
You can hear the passion in Mims when saying that. Emotions are running as high as they can heading into the week for OU.
Two roads, right? Which one are the Sooners going to take, getting the season back on track or completely falling off that cliff?
Emotion is going to key, but Venables is trying his hardest to make sure the team isn’t feeding off emotion alone.
Or as he has phrased it before, effort means nothing. It’s effort with technique.
“And so that's my focus is to make sure that the emotion doesn't paralyze you, you know, so that you can't have an intense focus about what we need to do to win and what you need to do individually to play well,” Venables said. “So that's really trying to balance the game itself where our focus is, you know, about being inside out and this is about Oklahoma and what we need to do to improve.
“We should always play with passion and a love for the game. And you get 12 guaranteed opportunities. And so we've got seven more games. And this is the biggest game of the year because it's the next one.”
It’s the next one, and a chance to try to right a wrong from the previous two games. OU’s defense has allowed more than 1,200 yards of offense and 96 points in losses to Kansas State and TCU.
The first, OK, could be a fluke. But the second one in Fort Worth? Just flat-out humiliating. That doesn’t happen to OU. That doesn’t happen to a Venables-led defense.
Time to show a little heart.
“You know we’re kind of… I feel like the pulse of our team right now is we’re a little bit – we’re madder than anybody out there with the way we’ve played in the last two weeks,” linebacker DaShaun White said. “And so it’s our next opportunity to go and put what happened in the past to rest.”
Both teams are 3-2, so the national focus is not there this year. Neither team is ranked. More than anything, it’s about pride. But pride can certainly help you turn the tide.
“Most definitely. It’s not hard to get up for this one,” running back Eric Gray said. “It’s OU-Texas. It’s a big game. I don’t think anybody’s going to have trouble getting up for this one, so it’s definitely helpful for us to have a chance to turn it around.”
A chance to get this train moving in the right direction again. It would just be a start, but you can’t think of a better one than to help Venables win his first RRS and show what Team No. 128 is really all about.