Drive Thriller – Hitting Texas in the Mouth! By: JY Posted on: October 17, 2013

Image from the AP/the Daily Texas/Norman Transcript (Photographer: Chelsea Purgahn)

A thing we’ve been hearing about all week is how Texas hit us in the mouth and we had no answer.  While the game may have felt that way due to some of the big plays, penalties and turnovers, there was a point in the game we could have stepped back in and taken control.  I thought we did just that coming off of the big kickoff return Finch had late in the 2nd quarter.

We had the ball on the 27 yard line, and ran five consecutive run plays for the score.  I’ve diagrammed a couple of them here to show how we hit Texas in the mouth, and had we stuck with this kind of play calling, Texas might have eventually done what Texas tends to do – lay down.

In the image below you’ll see that Daryl Williams, Ripkowski and Millard did an outstanding job play side.  Daryl has his guy on the ground and Ford is looking to get north and south in a hurry.

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That’s what you call hitting someone in the mouth! Daryl William’s got his guy in the sandbox and making sure he gets a mouth full.

Enter the “Ford Tough” clichés because Texas isn’t going to get Ford down until he gets another three yards after contact.  He’s so violent when he runs, and had we kept feeding him the ball the Texas “5 stars” would have grown tired of tackling him. Soon enough the self consoling chants of “we don’t live in Norman” would have come out as we plow over Texas. But alas it wasn’t meant to be this year.

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Lets turn to the fourth play of the same scoring drive.  On this play Ripkowski and Daryl Williams are going to do some more plowing but this time Damien Williams is going to get in on the action..  Millard does a great job getting north and south to get it down to the three.
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What I particularly like is that Daryl has Santos blocked beyond the first down marker, and Rip has driven his guy all the way to the stripe as well.  Again, had we stuck with this kind of play calling, we would have sliced up that Texas defense (and lets not get it twisted – despite the lack of a passing game we were still running on Texas for 5.6 yards per carry – to read more about our run game versus Texas and why we should have run it please check out the “Run the Dang Ball” article from earlier this week: https://thefootballbrainiacs.com/?p=368).
Again on the same drive, in the pictures below you can see what happens when we go big.  Texas doesn’t have an answer for it.  Ripkowski is lined up at the left tight end spot, and Millard is lined up in a wing behind him.  You can see that Texas is having a hard time getting lined up, and we have them outnumbered.
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As the play progresses you’ll see in the image below Millard’s eyes are looking back inside for the scraping player.  We seal the edge. , and Damien scores standing up. We bullied them on this drive! Keep in mind on the first play I outlined earlier with Ford, we were running there with a tight end.  Had we stuck with the tight end sets, it would have hit Texas where they have been the weakest all season…stopping the run.
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Now I know everyone is pretty down on Coach Heupel and I can’t blame you. But I’ll just say that this was a beautifully called short drive. If Coach Stoops can get Heupel to continue down this path then we can have a lot of success. And while that may not happen its comforting to know that a) we can run it down peoples throat when we want to and b) we’ve seen our OC call a great run series so we know he can do it if he’s willing. I’ll concede that knowing he can call the plays doesn’t matter if he won’t, but not having the ability to really call a great run series or execute the run is of far greater concern.

In my estimation, from here on out, we need to line up and say “we’re Oklahoma” and pound the rock down the other team’s throat. Everything I’ve seen tells me we are capable of doing it in a way that I haven’t seen us be able to do in a while.