Continuing an earlier conversation with
@Gigem that started on the SEC Championship thread..... may be of some interest to
@CWSooner as well.....
Because there is no one else in the office and I have literally nothing to do today, I punched up that historically lopsided 77-0 2003 affair between OU and A&M to see what, exactly, goes into an outlier like that. It's a weird game to watch retrospectively.
With the final score already being reached and 8:40 left in the 4th quarter, OU had 1st and goal at the 3 yard line, and I thought, how do they
not score again? The QB kneels the ball on first down, which seems to answer the question, but then, bizarrely, OU runs it up the middle for the next three plays, somewhat lacklusterly I have to say, and with mostly backup linemen, and A&M makes the stop. If you're going to kneel the ball, then just kneel the ball. If you're going to run the ball, just run the ball. Doing one after the other was just weird.
Up 49-0 at the half, OU benched QB Jason White and played Paul Thompson the entire second half, which I did not remember. So they were already taking their foot off the brake in one way. The problem was that Thompson was pretty good running the option and while they mostly quit throwing it, A&M's defense was just as hapless against the second string QB as they were the first.
A&M did not look slow, as I remembered. Really just one guy for OU, WR Mark Clayton, had a few plays where he outran would-be tacklers, but it mostly looked like Clayton was just really, really fast, and one or two plays in particular, he kinda broke the ankles of his defenders with some really good jukes. Mostly A&M just looked out of position, with
awful tackling, and there were some plays when the front 7 was flat overpowered by the Sooner O-linemen. I have to say, OU executed really well, which seemed to be the biggest explanation to combine with A&M's severe defensive growing pains, but they certainly weren't schematically complex, neither did they look like athletic freaks. Not any more than we're used to seeing from good teams, anyway. And this was before Gus Malzahn had infected the world with his HUNH, and one of the most striking things about the game was just how much time each team took between plays. In other words--with all due respect to that Sooner team--that offense looked a bit vanilla. A well-oiled machine, but vanilla. By today's standards, anyway. The commentators mentioned a few times that A&M was in the low 70's nationally in defense and how young and rebuilt that unit was, so....there's that.
Also, the Sooner offense only scored 70. The final TD came on an A&M fumble with an ensuing scoop-and-score.
The Sooner defense was a bit more impressive, I thought. But A&M also gave them a lot of gifts. McNeal was off target a bunch, receivers dropped some passes, and the OL struggled with assignments against even mundane Sooner fronts. Like their OL counterparts, the Aggie DL also looked overwhelmed at times. It was so weird....A&M didn't look
that far removed from OU talent-wise, but OU was clearly somewhat better on the lines and played a nearly flawless game, such that each individual play you wouldn't be expecting this score, but it was just so consistent that it all added up. That's my takeaway watching that again, the two teams were really consistent. A&M consistently couldn't open the holes, OU could. A&M consistently didn't allow enough time on passing downs, OU did. Jason White nailed his reads and threw a good ball nearly every play. Reggie McNeal missed stuff that was there with either bad reads or bad throws, and he never really snapped out of it.
To me, it was less of a bludgeoning and more like death by a thousand paper cuts. Granted, it was like paper cuts coming in 8 and 9 yards a pop. But they didn't go out there and air-raid the hell out of A&M with two-play drives and such. They just kept having good plays and never really had bad ones. That is highly irregular for any game, and it shows me just how irregular it is, because if a team can do all the little things right that often, you can historically romp on a team that's somewhere between bad and mediocre.
The booth announcers and the halftime crew (including Craig James (CJK5H)) did a fair bit of slobbering over how wide the separation was between OU and everyone else. There was speculation about who would make it to the Sugar in the BCS to play them. LSU, at #7 as of that game, never came up. One guy speculated USC. Every team that was mentioned wasn't given much of a chance, or was repeatedly said to need big improvements between now and then. The GREATEST TEAM OF ALL TIME did come up at least twice during the broadcast. I honestly don't know what kind of talent KSU had that year, but the Big 12 CG is less shocking to me now, having rewatched this one. OU looked like a talented, clean-playing team, but one that was a bit vanilla and even, I have to say, kinda low energy. Like, modern UGA teams would've beat those guys just from the sheer vibrations emitted from their excited, barking bodies. OU looked good, but not amped up at all. I wonder if that personality hurt the team in their later losses.
