Today was a great day for the Sooners, despite the 41-24 loss to UCLA. They showed character and heart, coming back and playing hard despite their mistakes. OU gave up 17 points off of turnovers, yet still managed to keep it fairly close until the last half of the last quarter (we'll get to that little issue in a moment). Rhett Bomar finally showed us the highly-touted recruit we spent the spring and summer hearing about. He showed amazing poise, continuing to play hard after his early problems. He showed incredible toughness, taking several hard hits from UCLA's defense. He ended up completing 20 of 29 pass attempts for 241 yards (and through no fault of his own, no touchdowns...one great pass hit the receiver in the hands in the endzone, but was dropped.) The defense played well, holding UCLA's Maurice Drew to 69 total yards and under 50 yards until the last of the fourth quarter (again, we'll discuss that shortly).
Let me describe the game I saw. OU struck first, with a bit of trickery; Travis Wilson's 56-yard TD run of a fake-to-Peterson-then-reverse-to-Wilson was a wonderful piece of deception, perfectly executed, and one that made me believe we were well on the way to a win. OU held on well through the first half, but made the same mistakes they've been making the previous two weeks. No interceptions today, thankfully, but the fumbles and the muffed punt really took a lot of the wind out of OU's sails, especially considering that OU's defense was doing an excellent job holding UCLA's entire offense out of the endzone. While OU still made mistakes throughout the game, the defense still held up until the end. Finally, at the end of the first half, the offense started to get things working, with Bomar making plays, and more importantly, great passes. He moved the ball down the field with amazing efficiency until they stalled out at the 4-yard line and settled for a field goal to go into halftime only trailing 13-10. The first drive after halftime led to another mistake, as OU fumbled and UCLA picked it up and ran in for a touchdown to go up 20-10. However, OU recovered nicely, driving the length of the field and scoring a touchdown to again pull within 3 at 20-17. UCLA answered with a long drive of their own, the only one to that point in which the defense appeared to not be up to the task of stopping UCLA. OU went three and out, and UCLA started to drive again. Things looked grim until OU (and more specifically, Demarrio Pleasant, who had a great game in place of the injured Clint Ingram) stepped up, took a tipped ball out of the air and ran in back to the UCLA 25-yard line. Here's where God (and the game officials) took a hand. One of the referees through a flag on a defensive holding call that even ABC's Dan Fouts admitted he couldn't see. Indeed, the official who threw the flag, when questioned, couldn't give the number of the player he was calling the penalty on, something unusual under the NCAA's new rules regarding calling penalties (numbers are required now, whereas they weren't in the past). Replays show no holding that could be legitimately called holding; all contact was at the line of scrimmage and none was what would typically be called, anyway. This last blow killed the spirit of the OU defense, and they gave up a touchdown, and one more later for UCLA to seal the deal. I saw a game where, just like last week, the score did not reflect how close the game actually was. Last week, OU was blasted because the score was so close. The margin of victory in this game was only 1 point greater, yet OU gets absolutely no credit. You'd think OU had been awful from start to finish.
The REAL story today, though, was how no one outside of Oklahoma wanted OU to win, including God Himself. Several bits of evidence emerge to demonstrate the truth of this statement. First, ABC's Keith Jackson had another marginal call, given he's practically a homer in a situation like this. Jackson's bias toward West Coast teams is very well-known, and though he's professional enough, he could hardly contain his glee at OU's misfortune at the hands of one of his beloved Pac-10 teams. (To his credit, Dan Fouts did a pretty good job of giving an objective call as Keith's sidekick.) Second, the national press coverage I've seen both before and after this game never really gave OU a chance to win. The AP's resulting story with the headline, "UCLA Hammers Sooners", demonstrates this quite well (and if you read the copy, it's pretty obvious the writer didn't actually watch the game; s/he gives the description of the game that the box score and stat lines give, only in words rather than numbers). Even my site of choice, CollegeFootballNews.com, provides analysis that makes me wonder if the writer was only half-watching while he had two other games on his other TVs. All he could talk about was how OU just made more mistakes and couldn't step up when they needed to, as though they simply weren't worthy and that UCLA was obviously the better team. I must totally disagree (and I will send him a quick message telling him so). Take a look at the final stats; OU had more first downs, more total possession time, nearly twice the rushing yards, and exactly 1 more yard of total offense than UCLA had. Everyone is making a huge deal out of Drew Olson's play? Well, Rhett Bomar, whom the entire world (including many Sooner fans) decried as a wet-behind-the-ears rookie who might not get his act together in time to salvage 6 wins, had 7.5 yards-per-pass average, compared to Olson's 7.9 yards-per-pass average. He ended 20-of-29 (69%) compared to Olson's 28-of-38 (74%). He may have made mistakes, but he was able to keep his team in the game almost to the very end.
OU did very well, considering the way they'd looked in the first two games. BUT THEY COULDN'T SELL THEIR SOULS FOR A BREAK TODAY. Critical momentum-killing bad luck strikes constantly wiped out any momentum they were able to build. Sure, they had the muffed punt and two more fumbles that resulted in 17 UCLA points, but two of those turnovers were on the sideline, where the ball could just as easily have bounced out of bounds. In both cases, though, the ball didn't go out of bounds or in the direction of an OU player, but rather directly to a UCLA player. OU's last fumble to start the second half, again, bounced directly to a UCLA player who scooped it up easily for the touchdown return. The blown calls (and there were actually quite a few more than the big one I mentioned previously) seemed to come at the worst possible times for OU. Even the onside kick OU attempted after their last touchdown saw the ball squirt tantalizingly off of the outstretched fingertips of Travis Wilson (another of the game's heroes), despite his obvious best efforts to reel it in. The press has merely seen fit to pile on a program that, frankly, deserved better after the effort and attitude they showed today. UCLA deserves all the credit for the game they played. Drew Olson certainly lived up to his hype for this game. He's a great quarterback. To be honest, though, I don't think they deserved to win by the final score of this game. I believe that if you give OU one decent break today, they would have the win. UCLA played very well, but everything else conspired to hand them the win today. OU is still not the team they've been the past few years, but let's try to give them a little credit for a game performance, rather than simply dimissing them as obviously miserable. (Seriously, at least this season will keep fans on the edges of their seats a bit more than the past few seasons have.)
Take heart, fellow Sooner fanatics. We're at least on the right track again. For the first time since before the season started, I actually feel that we have a chance to beat Texas, and for this year, THAT'S saying something.
Thanks for reading along.
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