How do you win the Red River Shootout? The in-game adjustment

The Red River Shootout is one of college football’s most unique rivalry games for a lot of reasons. The most obvious, and not an insignificant one, is that it takes place in a divided stadium at a neutral site. The 50-50 split among fans on either side of the stadium leads to wild emotional swings which have a discernible impact on the morale of the players. Rather than going from a roar to a hush, the stadium goes from a roar to a roar with one side always on top of the world.

[Join Inside Texas TODAY with code HOOKEM and get 50% off annual memberships!]

There’s another unique factor to this rivalry though which is the intense focus each program puts on the game and the fact that it comes early enough on the schedule for either team to hold back what are often huge wrinkles in strategy.

At the Oklahoma media conference Steve Sarkisian noted what he’s learned about the nature of this rivalry game from the last few seasons facing the Brent Venables Sooner defense.

“One of the things coming out of the last couple years is that what’s on tape might not necessarily be what we’re gonna get,” Sark said of his takeaways from the last few Red River games. “And so we’ve got to do a great job in game of adjusting, especially early on, to whatever they present to us.”

This game has often been defined by one side presenting a novel scheme or wrinkle and the other team either adjusting or struggling to find answers.

“Like us, we take a lot of pride, if we get two weeks to prepare offensively we feel pretty good that we’re going to put together a great gameplan and our guys can execute it,” Sark said of the extra focus on this game and the heightened intensity with both teams coming off bye weeks. “I feel the same way about Coach Venables on the defensive side. You give him two weeks, they’re gonna have a really good defensive plan and their guys are gonna be dialed in and that’s when it comes down to execution. That’s when it comes down to some in-game adjustments to adjust to whatever they’re doing.”

A history of adjustments

One of the first big wrinkle/counter battles I ever saw in this game was in 2008 when I was a student attending the game with a big group of friends. Oklahoma came into the game with its normal array of set piece plays and blazing fast tempo which was the calling card that season. Texas had two big wrinkles stored up for the Sooners.

The first was an elaborate series of play-calls on defense from new coordinator Will Muschamp that were thrown into the trash bin when the Longhorns were struggling to get the calls in fast enough to be able to line up and play fundamentally good defensive football. The Sooners built up a 14-3 lead early on before that adjustment came.

The other big wrinkle was a 4-wide set which removed Texas’ iffy tight ends from the field (they’d lost potential star Blaine Irby earlier in the season) and replaced them with Jordan Shipley. Matching Shipley up to run option routes on Oklahoma’s middle linebackers (the starter tore his knee trying to chase Shipley) completely altered the nature of the game. Venables spent the rest of the game throwing adjustments out to try and counter the 4-wide set and couldn’t change the fundamentals back in Oklahoma’s favor.

Last year’s game featured Oklahoma unveiling a 3-high “Flyover” sort of defensive package with a four-down front it played on passing downs. It was essentially the same concept as the three-high Dime package the Longhorns have used as their third down package in 2024. Between a keen awareness of the Texas playbook and this disconcerting package, Oklahoma was able to keep the Longhorn offense under wraps for their first three drives.

Texas eventually adjusted and fought back into the game, but those early moments arguably killed the Longhorns when the defense was too gassed to stop Sooner scoring drives to close the 2nd and 4th quarters.

How do you prepare to handle these big adjustments when they come?

“One is our own execution of what we’re doing,” Sark said when asked about this dynamic. “I’m sure they’re probably thinking we’re gonna have something new for them too, right? So it’s like anything. I’m a big boxing fan so, you think about some of those big fights and guys getting in the ring throwing jabs trying to figure out ‘is this guy gonna fight me southpaw today and if so what does that look like?’ And so on and so forth. So, we wanna make sure we’re throwing good jabs but we also want to make sure that we lean into the things we do well. If we’ve got a great overhand right or great hook, whatever that is, we gotta make sure we throw those punches too at the opportune times.”

Landing the overhand right

This is the sort of game where each team wants to be ready to lean extra hard on their strongest feature in order to get the win. Sam Ehlinger averaged 20+ carries in four games at the Cotton Bowl against the Sooners and other quarterbacks such as Colt McCoy and Dillon Gabriel often saw their run game workload increase in this game.

The best Red River Shootout wrinkles emphasize the best personnel for a given team. The heavy Ehlinger or Gabriel run game plans emphasized dangerous features of either offense they didn’t want to employ every week because of the injury risk to their star players.

During these two weeks leading up to the game, each team has identified what they believe will be their “overhand right” which gives them the best chance at a knockout and are trying to tailor their gameplan around making sure they can throw it at key points in the game.

Oklahoma has some advantage in knowing exactly what it needs to do to have a chance in this game because the Sooners’ paths to victory are so narrow. Their gameplan needs to effectively emphasize their pass-rushers and quarterback Michael Hawkins‘ playmaking in space. If Texas can neutralize either of those factors, it’s probably a wrap, but the Horns have their own strengths to emphasize as well.

[Subscribe to the Inside Texas YouTube channel and help get us to 10,000 subs!]

Going into the game, each team will need a plan for maximizing their own path but also an awareness of how the other team could change things up like Sark’s “southpaw” example, so they can make the inevitable adjustments which will define the outcome.