Final Exam | Army

And the Army goes rolling along… and along… and along. They rolled along so much in fact that the Black Knights held possession of the ball for literally three quarters of the game. Here are some remarkable stats from a game, unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed.

Offense

Oklahoma’s offense is used to running nearly 70 plays per game. On Saturday, the Sooners were held to just 40. The Sooners averaged 8.9 yards per snap, but that doesn’t really translate to many points if you only get to snap the ball a handful of times.

Kyler Murray looked good again, as he was 11 for 15 for 165 yards and three touchdowns. Despite only completing 11 passes, Murray spread the ball to 7 different receivers.

Trey Sermon had a decent day with 119 yards, although I’m sure most of you would have loved to have that 120th yard.

All-in-all the offense did what it needed to do, but it all sort of feels empty. Neither Murray nor the rest of the offense was on the field enough to really feel good or bad about their performance.

Defense

There is an old episode of The Twilight Zone titled “Shadow Play”. In it, Adam Grant is a man stuck inside a recurring dream in which he is sentenced to death and executed. Every time the switch is flipped on the electric chair, he finds himself back in the courtroom being sentenced all over again. After every sentencing, he spends hours dreading not the execution itself, but the knowledge that when it’s done, he has to relive it over and over again with no power to stop it.

After Saturday night, Sooners fans can relate to Adam Grant.

The Black Knights slowly and methodically drove the ball down the field and it seemed the Sooner defense was simply powerless to stop it. Fans would watch the Sooners force a fourth down, only to wake up facing a 1st down all over again.

The numbers on the surface don’t look too bad. Oklahoma held Army to a very reasonable 4.4 yards per play. The only problem was, those 4.4 yards seemed to come on every play.

 

 

The histogram above shows how many of Army’s plays went for different yardages, 0-5 yards, 5-10 yards etc.  As you can see, Army had 46 of their 87 plays go for 0-5 yards. 53% of their offensive snaps went for positive yardage, but for five or fewer yards. Talk about a slow bleed…

It didn’t matter what down it was either. Army was forced into 21 different 3rd downs and converted 13 of them. They also converted four of five 4th-down conversion attempts. If you’re keeping track, of the 21 times Army was forced into a 3rd-down situation, they eventually gained a 1st down in 17 of them (81% of the time). To put this into a bit of perspective, before Saturday the Sooners were allowing that to happen just 41% of the time.

To make Saturday’s game even stranger, Kenneth Murray set what was may be the most controversial NCAA records ever achieved by a Sooner.

Murray set an NCAA record for tackles in a single game with 28.

On one hand, it’s an incredible number, especially in this era of spreading the ball around the field. Not only were the guts and mental fortitude it took to stay in and keep finding the ball all night simply incredible, but I can’t imagine the physical toll it had to have taken on him.

On the other hand, there is no reason that Army should have ever been allowed to run the number of plays necessary for a record like that to even be possible.

In the end, of course, everyone should congratulate him. Although there shouldn’t have been an opportunity for it, at least he made the tackles and set the record. The game would have been a whole lot uglier if he hadn’t.

Special Teams

I have one note here. Never leave a game to be decided on the foot of a kicker.

After one of the strangest games, I can remember, Oklahoma is 4-0 going into conference play. Baylor is next for the Sooners. Check back later this week for the next lesson.

 


 

The Professor, also known on Twitter as Blinkin Riley (Steven Smith) will be dropping some knowledge on us throughout the season with a pre-game lesson and a post-game lesson each week! We encourage you to follow his Twitter account @blinkinriley for additional mini-lessons…