Good Teams Win These

Another not pretty win, but there were several things to like about what we saw yesterday, to wit:

1. No points allowed in the second half. OK, our “no touchdowns allowed by the defense” streak is over, but we knew that wasn’t going to last all season. BYU’s quarterback was pretty good, and we’ll see two Heisman candidate QBs down the road next week and at Southern Cal, so it was good to see we could make the halftime adjustments and lock things down in Quarters 3 and 4. And this has been a consistent quality of the defense all season. It gets better in the second half. We’ve got great players up front, but the coaching staff gets a lot of credit, too.

2. The “three headed monster” of Wood/Atkinson/Riddick. No dancing, no stretching things out to the sidelines. They run with purpose on every play and run forward. We’ve now twice had two of them over 100 yards in the same game. That’s pretty good, and don’t be surprised if it happens once or twice more. I’ll take a 6.3 yards per carry average every game, thank you very much.

3. Game Planning: we sometimes complain about the team not establishing the run, or not establishing the pass. Heck, Tommy Rees only completed one pass (!) in the second half yesterday. But I think this is kind of a Patriots-like team, where going into each given Saturday, we don’t exactly know what the game plan is going to be. Could be a balanced game, could be run heavy, could be pass heavy. With Rees at QB, we might have expected more pass heavy. But the running game was the horse yesterday.

4. Looking Ahead: With Rees QBing yesterday and Golson starting next week, the Sooners will get a little less out of the game tapes than they might have otherwise gotten. They’re definitely different QBs in abilities and style, so that’s a point in our favor. And re the game planning above, do you think Coach Kelly was trying to play things close to the vest so as not to show OU a whole bunch to plan for? Risky when you eke out a 3 point win, and catastrophic if we had lost. But we didn’t, so if that was the plan, it worked.

5. Over the last several years, we’ve always lost at least one game “we weren’t supposed to lose”. This could have been that game (Purdue too!). But we didn’t. A confidence builder.

Definitely some things not to like about yesterday. Two missed field goals. Couldn’t close out the game on offense, had to punt it away one last time. Then the one time we needed Turk to shank one, he blows it into the end zone. Very conservative play calling on first and goal before our first made field goal. We looked like Stanford!

One final good thing I’ve been meaning to mention all season, and this is a biggie. This team likes each other. You can tell that the sideline vibe is different than in years past. There is more “team” in this team. Perhaps it’s the third year thing. We now probably have a majority of the team being “Kelly’s boys” now; the Weis hangover is over. Whatever it is, it feels great. Not that it’s hard when you’re 7-0, but the stadium seems to have really embraced this team. Sounds louder on TV, thousands wearing leis for Manti, etc. This team has a really positive aura, if you will.

So it’s on to Norman, for what we knew was going to be a big game back in August, but now, it’s really big. OU is looking to be a 1-loss team with BCS championship hopes, so they have just as much riding on the game as we do. And they’re GOOD. I watched some of the shellacking they put on Kansas last night—fast, explosive, QB with 33 starts under his belt, etc. This will be our biggest challenge of the year.

So we can bask in the glow of 7-0 for a few days, then focus on the Sooners. I think we’ll have ESPN Gameday attending the second ND game of the year. When’s the last time that happened? At least for now, we’re back.

GO IRISH!!!! BEAT SOONERS!!!!!

The Colonel