Silly Red River Shootout Narratives
An extended version of the Oklahoma hate week has allowed a lot of different ideas about the Longhorns’ psyche for the Red River Shootout to bubble to the surface.
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“Oklahoma just wants this game more.”
“Sooner fans own the Cotton Bowl.”
“OU dedicates an inordinate amount of focus to this game.”
“They always come out with way more intensity than we do.”
What that turns a blind eye toward is a very, very, very simple fact: Oklahoma has been very good at football for a long freaking time.
The Sooners’ successes in the Cotton Bowl, specifically since Bob Stoops replaced John Blake, don’t have as much to do with an altered motivation as this being a regular case of a high-ceiling program scraping its head on the tiles at a higher clip than Texas and proving it on the field.
That’s not to say OU doesn’t get up for rivalry games. It has to do with the fact that Oklahoma has been one of the best programs in college football in the 21st century.
That’s also not to say inferior teams can’t win. But if you’re going to bring up 2013 and 2015, look at what year it is now.
On that note, I put the this century timeframe on this opinion so any “but Barry Switzer spying!” arguments can remain in the time period in which they occurred. Someone brought up recently that Larry Lacewell once admitted that OU spied on the Longhorns.
Lacewell last coached in Norman in 1977, and look at all the good it did his team in Dallas that season. Lacewell was out of coaching before the Big 12 came into existence.
Oklahoma is good at football. They’ve had good players as a result. They’ve won conference titles as a result. They’ve won a single national championship this century as a result and played for several more. Mack Brown boasted about nine 10-win seasons in the 2000s. Meanwhile, Oklahoma won six Big 12 Championships.
That carried on from Stoops to Lincoln Riley. Riley was 4-1 against Texas in the Red River Shootout and 5-1 in battles between the two teams. The record wasn’t due to some sort of excessive effort put forth in early October or in weeks (or months) prior, though that’s not to say they didn’t include some Texas prep in the early portions of training camp or the season. Guess what, that’s standard across college football.
Rather, that record was because Riley coordinated historically good offenses led by Heisman winners or finalists as part of a well-oiled machine.
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At the same time, Texas either failed to properly prepare for a game against a good opponent, or couldn’t get out of its own dang way. Brown, Charlie Strong, and Tom Herman were all guilty of this throughout their tenures.
Though Brent Venables as Riley’s successor has put Oklahoma through more downs than ups than it’s typically accustomed to, especially at quarterback, Texas hoping for a significant fall-off isn’t a winning strategy. Hope rarely is.
Oklahoma is still a quality football program. That’s why a win next Saturday would be a significant one for Texas Longhorns football under Steve Sarkisian.
It’d be a win over a top-20 opponent.
It’d be a win over a historic rival that rarely has down years.
It’d continue the Longhorns’ undefeated 2024 season.
It’d provide a validation for Sarkisian in rivalry games, one of the few areas of his tenure that needs real improvement
It’d be a celebratory day for Longhorn fans.
It’d be a win over an extremely good football program. It wouldn’t be a sign of Texas wanting it more, or coming out with more focus, or being more aggressive.
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It would be a sign of Texas being the better team in the Cotton Bowl, and that’s no small accomplishment when we’re talking about playing any form of the Oklahoma Sooners.
