ESSENTIALS:

Overview

The transformation is now complete. Brent Venables, the wizard behind the Clemson dynasty's defense, waited and waited until the perfect opportunity for a head coaching job. He finally found it when Lincoln Riley, offensive wizard, departed for USC. The plan was simple: coast on Riley's offense as they Venablized the defense.

The defense did get better. The offense, of course, got worse. Running out of Riley, their next idea to avoid the inevitable descent into Iowadom was to import someone else's gangbusters offense. In came Wazzu's quarterback, Wazzu's hotshot young coordinator, Wazzu's hotshot quarterbacks coach, and Wazzu's spread-RPO offense. Mateer's spinning Favre impression worked against Michigan, with a little luck (they dropped two picks) and ankle grease (the safeties went 0/3 on unblocked sack attempts) but wasn't sustainable through a hand injury, a flat deep ball, a flat delivery, and Favresque decisions. DCasheadcoachitis has set in.

So here's the new plan: keep all the Wazzu guys, but bring back Kevin Wilson as the "Assistant Head Coach for Offense," feed Mateer all the protein shakes in the West, and put him under center with a fullback and two or three tight ends coached by Jason Witten.

Most of that defense returned—so much of it that Cole Sullivan is just a spare part off the bench. If it's not #1 in the country it's only because those last few percentage points are chancy.

Thus far it's worked, but Oklahoma's warmup was UTEP, the future Michigan foe that was last by a mile in all but one category* when Alex ranked them. The first drive was all 10-yard runs, the second was a punt return touchdown, and the rest of the game was everybody trying to get out of there before the Angry Oklahoma Offensive Lineman-Hating God could track them down. In this they were unsuccessful. In everything else the Sooners look like a fringe Playoff team.

* [He thought their linebackers were better than Western's. Erp.]

[AFTER THE JUMP: Welp, we forgot to quarterback again.]

The Sponsors

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Featured Musician: Jacob Givens

THE VIDEO:

[After THE JUMP: The show notes, eventually.]

Previously: Oklahoma Offense

We're now ready to take a gander at the Sooners' defense. The strength of their team a year ago, Oklahoma is stomaching some losses on this side of the ball, while still returning tons of talent. The expectation of this defense is for it to be elite, but could the UTEP game provide us a few clues on vulnerabilities? Let's take a look: 

The Film: Still using the season opener against UTEP because that's all we have to go off of. 

Personnel: Click for big or HERE for PDF. 

The starting defensive line for Oklahoma looks different on this year's graphic than it was on last year's, but all the players on the line were heavily used rotation pieces in 2025. The team lost Gracen Halton and Damonic Williams, two excellent tackles, but return Jayden Jackson, who we had listed as a starter last year, and rising star David Stone Jr. A third year former 5*, Stone is expected to explode this season and has been seen in the first round of some NFL Draft projections (a clunker of a game in the opener kept the star off him, though). As for Jackson, he's more of an innings eater but a decent innings eater. Georgia State transfer Bishop Thomas, as well as inexperienced returners Trent Wilson and Wyatt Gilmore round out the depth, which may be a little shaky. 

The EDGE defenders are more familiar, even if they were listed as backups a year ago. Though OU graduated the fearsome R Mason Thomas to the NFL Draft, they still have our Dangerman Taylor Wein, who exploded to have a seven sack, 36 pressure season last year. He's a player to be concerned about and a bit better than co-starter Adepoju Adebawore, brother of Adetomiwa, who was a star at Northwestern and is now with the Colts. Adebawore was EDGE4 last season and was fairly unremarkable but should be a quality starter as a senior. Those two will shoulder the vast majority of the snaps but 4.5* true freshman Jake Kreul and UTSA transfer Kenny Ozowalu might mix in a little bit. 

The linebackers are similar to last year, with Kobie McKinzie graduating but Kip Lewis returning as a starter. Owen Heinecke slides in next to Lewis but he was already in the rotation a year ago as a blitzing/coverage LB. I think Lewis and Heinecke are a stellar tandem (Heinecke a bit better to earn the star) and did well to help cover up a surprisingly shaky performance from the Sooners DL against UTEP. James Nesta was the most commonly used backup linebacker but Lewis and Heinecke played a lot in the opener. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: the clips]