Billy Bowman shares key areas Oklahoma defense must improve

Oklahoma had an up-and-down 2022 season, in part because the defense was porous enough that no lead was ever truly safe. The Oklahoma defense is out to fix that this year, going into its second year under Brent Venables‘ direction.

Veteran defensive back Billy Bowman believes the fix is actually relatively simple.

“It’s all a mentality,” he said this spring. “You just come to work every day and it’s something that you’ve got to want to do. So if you don’t want to do it then it’s not going to get done. But if you want to do it and put your mind to it it will get done.”

Here’s what Oklahoma has to fix: a defense that ranked 121st nationally in total defense (461.0 yards per game) and 98th in scoring defense (30.0 points per game allowed). The run and pass defense were pretty much equally bad, ranking 105th and 118th, respectively.

None of that is acceptable.

The good news for Sooners fans is that players are treating it that way, too. They expect better of themselves.

“I’m a winner and I love to compete, so I always want to win. We know that that’s not the standard here, so we’re doing our best to get it fixed,” Bowman said. “We had like eight dropped interceptions, so if we caught those eight interceptions we would have been No. 1 in the country in interceptions and takeaways. So just getting hats around the ball, creating those turnovers, whether it’s through the air or whether it’s punching it out, creating turnovers is always big.”

If there was a positive for the Oklahoma defense, it was definitely that.

The Sooners finished with 17 interceptions, ranking seventh nationally. They weren’t quite as good getting on top of fumbles, securing only four. Still, it’s a building block to work from.

If a second-year leap under Venables is expected, that’s probably where it starts.

For Bowman, the emphasis this spring was just focusing in on the details. He’s had two years of solid production in the secondary, but it’s those details that can help take his game — and that of the Oklahoma defense — to the next level.

“It’s things that, we lost four or five games by three points,” Bowman said. “So it’s the little things that we have to work on: missed tackles, eliminating explosive plays and things like that. I’m not predicting no future or anything like that, but it’s going to be a step up.”