The Sooners were a strong offensive team before Lincoln Riley arrived with his Air Raid offense, but since that time they have become an offensive juggernaut.
Since Riley came onboard as a member of the OU coaching staff in 2015, the Sooners have ranked in the top seven nationally in total offense every season and in the top three in each of the last four.
Over the last five seasons, Oklahoma has averaged 551.3 yards of total offense and 44.6 points per game. That ranks No, 1 in the nation. The problem has been that the Sooner defense has been among the worst in college football during that time, which has forced Oklahoma to have to outscore its opponents in order to secure a victory.
That dichotomy may work out favorably more times than not during the regular season, but when you go up against the better teams in the country — as in the the bowl season and especially in the College Football Playoff — you better be able to play good defense to take the pressure off of the offense to come away with points on every possession.
There is an age-old belief in football that great offenses score a lot of points and win games, but great defenses win championships.
Oklahoma has made it into the College Football Playoff each of the past three seasons. Teams in the Southeastern Conference have been recognized for years as being great defensive teams, the exact opposite of the Big 12’s reputation for wide-open, high-scoring offense. The Sooners have faced an SEC team in the opening round of the last three Playoffs and failed to make it out of the semifinal round.
Nick Saban’s No. 1-ranked Alabama Crimson Tide knocked off Kyler Murray and the Sooners, the nation’s top offensive team in the 2018 season, 45-34, that year’s College Football Playoff.
Saban, who has long been one of the strongest advocates of the notion great defenses beat great offenses, is beginning to change his tune.
Widely recognized as one of the foremost defensive minds in the modern era of college football, Saban told ESPN recently that college football is officially becoming an offensive game.
“It used to be if you had a good defense, other people weren’t going to score,”
Saban said. “You were always going to be in the game. I’m telling you, it ain’t that way anymore.”
This may have been something the Alabama head coach has been pondering for a while, but the idea seemingly hit home in a big way after the Crimson Tide defeated Georgia 41-24 in early October.
“Georgia has as good a defense as we do an offense, and we scored 41 points on them,” Saban said.
That may be the way that college football is evolving, but don’t count Saban among those that necessarily like it. “We just have to make sure we have an offense that’s that way and that explosive, which we have,” he said in the ESPN interview with Chris Lowe.
Alabama currently ranks fourth nationally in both scoring offense (47.2 points per game) and total offense (555.2 yards per game). Meanwhile, on defense, which used to be an Alabama strong suit, the Crimson Tide are 25th in scoring defense (22.0) and 48th in total defense (389.2).
By contrast, through seven games Oklahoma is sixth in scoring offense and 11th in total offense.
You can thank the offensive genius of guys like OU’s Riley, Mike Leach, former OU assistant and player Josh Heupel, and others for Saban’s monumental mindset shift.
All of this is music to the ears of Oklahoma fans, but I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the Sooners shouldn’t continue to get better and better on defense. Simply relying on outgaining and outscoring your opponent is not a sustainable winning formula.