Oklahoma turns bleak outlook into building block

KNOXVILLE — The weight of all those losses and all that criticism from nine months ago melted away in an instant.

As Oklahoma cornerback Zack Sanchez picked off Tennessee quarterback Josh Dobbs to seal the win in the second overtime Saturday, celebrations began along the Sooner sideline. Players jumping on top of one another. Some jawing with Vol fans in the stands. Bob Stoops, looking for someone to hug. "People start grabbing you and then you get your headset tangled up," he said afterward. "It's never choreographed just right."

But the win itself felt right, even despite a wild ending and a most unlikely 17-point comeback. It felt right because he couldn't remember the last time his defense had played this well — certainly not last year, when it served as the piñata for any and all critics of the team's mediocre 8-5 season. Stoops called Saturday's win against Tennessee "maybe my favorite" of all his big wins.

"Because of the mental toughness of our guys," Stoops said. "To hang around, 17 points down in that environment. Now, 17-3, 14 points down for all that time in that environment. Everybody kept fighting, kept playing. (There's) mental toughness and discipline to keep playing hard — and faith that things will work, things will come. And they did. It was a little late, but they came.

"That's what you appreciate as a coach, your players' mental attitude and their toughness and character, especially when you're coming into the season and there hasn't been a lot glowing about us. Because of last year."

Stoops' brother, Mike, knows this better than most. He's still Oklahoma's defensive coordinator, even after his defense was repeatedly torched last season, but he was reassigned and no longer coaches defensive backs — who often missed assignments or appeared lost during games a season ago.

"It's hard," Mike Stoops said Saturday. "We put some players in tough situations a year ago. … You're going up against very skilled quarterbacks and receivers. There's a learning process that goes with everything. We were one or two guys short last year. It wasn't as bad as everyone wants to make it out to be. I never thought that, and our players never thought that. That's just all noise. That comes from outside people and media. You have to know what's real and what isn't real.

"We knew we were a piece or two away last year from being dominant."

That might be a stretch. But it's clear that this year's defense — and team in general — has a quality that last year's didn't. It's more than a stubbornness or a refusal to lose. It's something internal, something that tells these players to keep pushing and keep trying until Baker Mayfield's pass attempts become completions, scrambles become first downs and eventually Sterling Shepard pulls in both the tying and winning touchdown passes.

The saying goes that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, these college football players have to be a bit insane then. The Sooners were stifled, repeatedly, for the game's first three quarters. Yet they kept trying to run the ball. They kept trying to get open. They clawed.

"It's the mindset that, no matter what, we're never out of the fight," Oklahoma's new offensive coordinator, Lincoln Riley, said. "We can explode at any time, no matter how badly we play. If we can get on one little run, we can be dangerous. Saying it and preaching it is one thing. Then doing it … that adds validity to it."

Said senior linebacker Eric Striker: "I've never been a part of anything like this. … It was a fight to the end. Literally, to the end."

No one thinks this one win will make the season a success; Oklahoma has far too great expectations for itself to be simply satisfied by that. No, the Sooners expect it to be a jumping-off point, or at the very least an outward signal of what they say they've known for awhile: That although they've got plenty of kinks to work on, plenty of facets of their game to improve, they may have what it takes to have a special season, too.

"It was important on so many levels," Riley told Paste BN Sports. "It was big conference-wise for our conference. It was big for people buying in to the new guys and new schemes. The defense played so well tonight. They won the game. They kept us in it when we weren't playing worth a darn.

"Winning big ones like this, it's huge. That's what this program has been based on for a long time. That's (been) our goal to get back to."

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