I must have too much time on my hands. One because I am starting a thread and two because I spent the time to look up a few stats. I remembered reading a quote from Stoops about the new offense. Something like he was willing to stick with it as long as it didnt hurt our D. By the numbers on espn. Per possesion OU had the ball 1 min 45 seconds on average. Texas drives on average took 3 min 12 seconds. Now both offenses scored on most of these drives as you know. Our D started strong but in the first three possesions they stayed on the field 9 min where as Texas D stayed on the field for 4, with the score being 7-3 OU. I know it is the D job to get off the field. OK I understand that! However it looks plain and simple to me. The faster our offense scores the more our D will give up. Ok well thats my side...blow me out of the water if you want, but our D looked alot like a TT team so many people make fun of.
Against a top notch D, the hurry up offense can definitely be a hinderance. You could see that both lines were worn out for OU in the second half. Time of possession was 37:10-22:50. You could even see the trend against TCU a bit too. OU scored their 21 points in the first quarter against a single saftey defense (hard to figure out why), but in the last 3 quarters, TCU got more pressure on Bradford, sacking him 4 times and 9 tackles for loss. OU only had 6 first downs in the last 3 quarters. Unless OU's linemen can get the run blocking going out of the no-huddle, I don't see a long term future for the hurry up.
The hurry-up only hurts if we hurry-up and 3-and-out. We haven't really hurried things that much this year. Many times, the ball isn't snapped until the play clock is down to a few seconds. We only quick snapped a few times when we thought the D wasn't ready and it didn't work against UT as they were all running plays. The no huddle enables the ability to run hurry-up at any time, but we only used it that way against UT during the last 2 desperation drives. Our 3-and-outs combined with UTs ability to move the chains wore out our D. It's critical to move the chains and it doesn't matter how you do it (UT did it via short pass).
The D being tired is an excuse. Plain and simple. Considering the competition they'd faced so far, they should've been fresh as a daisy. Bob certainly didn't think they were "tired" or he wouldn't have punted on the 4th and 2, in the vain hope they'd hold. Let's drop this whole "the offense is hurting our D" theory. It's ridiculous and is simply excusing mediocrity.
Great point. Good post. It's not like we didn't know McCoy was going to come after us either...I'm pretty sure Bob tried to slow down the game and it backfired. We were trading touchdowns all game.... Why switch? I think Bob knew he was screwed once he realized his mistake.
