Oklahoma defense owes Sooners fans an apology

The defense of Oklahoma football is why the Sooners aren’t championship-caliber.

Oklahoma football should have won a College Football Playoff game by now, but has not.

The Oklahoma Sooners are undoubtedly one of the best college football programs in the Power 5. If they get the right head coach, there’s really nothing any team in the Big 12 can do about it. There are only a handful of elite blue-blood jobs like this in college football. Though Lincoln Riley has been a great head coach for them, it has been his team’s defense that has held them back.

Alex Grinch has no choice but to get the Oklahoma defense right this season.

In the College Football Playoff era, Oklahoma has won the Big 12 five straight seasons, making the four-team field four of the last five years. However, the Sooners have come up short in the national semifinals each time they have qualified. Though the Georgia Bulldogs needed overtime to beat them in the 2018 Rose Bowl, a loss is still a loss, no matter how you slice it.

Despite having arguably the best quarterbacked team in the Power 5 since 2014, Oklahoma’s inability to slow anyone down defensively has hurt their championship viability and now has their 2020 season on life support. After falling to Chris Klieman’s Kansas State Wildcats as a massive favorite in back-to-back years, No. 18 Oklahoma has to beat the unranked Iowa State Cyclones.

At the start of the year, Oklahoma and Iowa State were seen as two of the four teams capable of winning the Big 12 Championship this year. With Iowa State suffering a shocking home loss in its season opener to the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns, the loser of this game in Ames on Saturday night will be a cross-off game for College Football Playoff implications. All the pressure is on Oklahoma.

For as magnificent as the Sooners offense has been since Riley arrived in Norman back in 2015, the defense has become a far cry from what it used to be under former head coach Bob Stoops. While Alex Grinch’s defense is supposedly a perfect complement to what Riley runs with the Air Raid, his side of the ball is why Oklahoma has not played for a national title in the playoff era.

For the last three-to-five years, Oklahoma has been a top-five program in college football, along with the Alabama Crimson Tide, the Clemson Tigers, Georgia and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Alabama and Clemson have won a pair of national titles apiece, and Georgia has played for one. Though Ohio State hasn’t gotten to a title bout in that span, the Buckeyes won it all back in 2014.

Other programs such as the LSU Tigers and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish have been right there, with LSU winning it all last year and Notre Dame making the playoff two years ago as a national independent. What all six of those programs have going for them that Oklahoma does not is the ability to trust its defense in a big spot. This is why Oklahoma finds itself where it is in 2020.

While we recognize Riley as a top-five head coach in college football, we have to wonder if this is as good as it gets for him at Oklahoma. The Sooners have shown they can go 12-0 or 11-1 in a 12-game season, beat whoever they’re matched up against in Arlington, but simply can’t hang with the upper crust of college football because of their defense. Will it change? Maybe not.

There is no margin for error with Oklahoma, and the Sooners need the defense to get better stat.

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