Improbable may be a generous word – after the third quarter, it seemed nigh unto impossible. While the Sooner defense had shut Tennessee down since it went up 17-0 early in the second quarter, the Sooner offense was in an epic struggle against both a stout Vol defense and itself. Penalties and dropped passes hounded the Sooners just as they did last week. And Tennessee is most definitely not Akron.
But the defense, with Devante Bond and Eric Striker running rampant in the Vol backfield, kept the Sooners in it long enough for the offense to finally get untracked. A pair of fourth-quarter TDs took the game to overtime, and Baker Mayfield’s fourth-down keeper for a TD in the bottom of overtime number 1 sent it to a second extra period. Sterling Shepard’s magnificent catch and leap over a Vol defender for the go-ahead TD in the top of the second overtime set the stage for Sanchez’ game-sealing pick.
Say what you want about Mayfield’s stat line for this game (hint – not great), but the kid was nails. With his offensive line doing its best impression of a sieve most of the night, Mayfield scrambled and scooted out of sack after sack, and in the fourth quarter finally made the Vol defense start to pay, and pay dearly. The kid never quit and he never let his teammates quit, and that’s something we couldn’t really have said about last year’s Sooners.
Mike Stoops had his best game in ages – dialing up timely pressure and generally keeping Tennessee off balance for much of the night. The defensive coordinator’s move to the booth is definitely paying dividends.
When he looks back at this game, Tennessee coach Butch Jones will surely regret the numerous possessions in the third quarter where his offense went three-and-out and stopped the clock repeatedly with incomplete passes. In the end, Tennessee’s failure to run much clock in the third quarter set the stage for the Sooners’ opportunity to win the game in the fourth quarter.
Jones also needs to check himself after admonishing Striker after the game about “class.” Any SEC coach, much less Jones, purporting to preach to anyone about class, is a joke. This from a guy who took Striker’s comments from earlier in the week about the SEC, which were both truthful and inoffensive, and blew them up around the Vol football complex. Hatari Byrd’s universal one-finger salute to the Tennessee fans is another story – that simply can’t happen, and he was wrong to do it.
And speaking of Tennessee fans, they were almost universally friendly and welcoming. The Sooner contingent was one of the largest, if not the largest to visit Knoxville, according to many. The lone exceptions were the young Vol fans one row down from us, who were more concerned with cursing and taunting Sooner fans than cheering for their own team. The local constabulary had to be called up to the heights of Section JJ to remove them, for their own good, as violence had already very nearly erupted once. After what we imagine was a rather stern discussion with the police, they were allowed to return a short time later and behaved themselves before slinking off quickly after the game was over.
The Tennessee campus was nice enough, apart from some fool building it on a series of hills, and it was quite a sight to see all those people in creamsicle orange. The stadium itself is a man-made canyon, with the steepest upper deck we have ever seen. It’s all metal, though, a giant Erector set with a little brick drizzled around the outside to fancy it up a bit. Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee and Rustoleum in Stillwater are a couple of other examples of this questionable architectural style.
As for the noise that was so much discussed in the week leading up to the game, we are not the best judges, as we were at the top of the stadium. While it was loud up there at times, we have heard it louder at Owen Field. We imagine that at field level, the noise was much greater. At the end, though, it was deathly quiet, save for those in crimson, who didn’t want to leave.
Make no mistake, this team has much work to do. But with the defense finally playing like a Sooner defense, the offense has a chance to find its legs. This was a learning experience for these young Sooners, and they got to learn and win at the same time. These kinds of lessons usually come with an L.
On to Tulsa, and breakfast in Norman. See you there.
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