Some perspective for all the Chicken Littles

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All net success rate does is strip out some noise and present a view of how two teams compared in the down to down business of moving the football.

Games are won and lost with explosives, special teams, turnovers, etc, and looking at net success rate just shows us how close the margins were.

It's a good diagnostic to go back and look at a game and learn something:
• Positive net success rate and lost? Let's identify what went wrong - were those decisive plays sustainable/likely to carry over into future performance?
• Huge net success rate and didn't win by much? Where might you have failed to take advantage of good situations or made mistakes on drives that altered the score? What does that tell us about going forward?
• Super even net success rate? Let's look at the weird plays! What does that tell us about the relative strength of the two teams and how they might perform going forward?

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The yardage discrepancy everyone keeps pointing to is such a loaded stat when you consider they had a pick 6, a 40+ yard punt return, and started inside our territory two other times on really bad turnovers.

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Except when they had to go full fields they didn't. Any. Their longest drive was 41 yards.

When they weren't handed the ball inside our 40

- 6 plays, 4 yards, punt
- 3 plays, 5 yards, punt
- 6 plays, 29 yards, punt
- 8 plays, 41 yards, 52 yard FG
- 5 plays, 26 yards, punt
- 3 plays, 1 yard, punt
- 8 plays, 20 yards, punt

They had 126 yards on 39 plays and scored 3 points on the 7 drives where we didn't give them the ball in scoring territory. Outside of Mateer's TD run right after Ryan's fumble we completely shut them down.

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People saying Oklahoma defense was elite... The stats don't agree. Granted , MAJORITY of those yards were before we had the lead. We did very little to pull away after getting the lead. We killed ourselves... Which is kinda becoming a trend (and that's what irritates me).

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I mean, they created those turnovers with their havoc, so somewhat like our general bend and stiffen in the red zone approach, they gave up some yards thinking eventually they'd sack us to end a drive or get a big play off pressure. And they did - to about as extreme an extent as could be expected.

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We did very little to pull away after getting the lead. We killed ourselves... Which is kinda becoming a trend (and that's what irritates me).

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Agree - when we scored to go up 1, got a 3 and out and got the ball back you have to find a way to go capitalize. And we gave up a sack fumble immediately.

Thank you TS, this board has been unbearable with all these experts

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The yardage discrepancy everyone keeps pointing to is such a loaded stat when you consider they had a pick 6, a 40+ yard punt return, and started inside our territory two other times on really bad turnovers.

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Sure but we averaged 5.3 yards a play and they averaged 4.1. That’s a pretty big disparity


I thought we played pretty well overall but also did all of the things that let’s an inferior team win

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I thought we played pretty well overall but also did all of the things that let’s an inferior team win

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Yep - can't think of a game that better personifies "they made the big plays to win the game" than that one.

We won the large majority of the 126 plays (80-85%) in the game, but the ones they won they made count bigly.

It felt like a lower scoring version of the 2015 Ole Miss game.

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Yep, I didn’t walk out of that stadium pissed off at coaches

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My only thing is that both this game and South Carolina, we put EVERYTHING on a 7 minute drive in the 4th. It’s worked once, failed once

Ty is money in the 2 minute. We should’ve tried for 2 possessions

Oklahoma capitalized on our mistakes and didn't make any that were back-breakers.

You can't have a pick 6, 2 fumbles at your own 30 and blow an easy 36yd fg right before the half. We dropped a few interceptions and possibly 3-4 passes on offense. We were in the game all day with a chance to win at the end. If we play a relatively clean game we win that one by 10-13 points. Sadly we punched ourselves in the dick a lot Saturday.

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Absolutely. And if you're going to try to play it so that they don't get the ball back, don't hit the brakes until you've actually gotten a drive going and are in plus territory. It was awful strategy. Especially with how garbage OU's offense was all day. We could have gotten another possession easily once it got to 4th and long if we hadn't taken all goddamn day to get to that point.

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Exactly - if we get to their 45 with 3 minutes left I completely get deciding let's make this be it, we're going on 4th down unless we're inside the 15, etc.

But we decided that from back at our own 25 or 30 with 7 minutes left.