OU wants to stop skid
Stoops' Sooners have lost past three trips to a BCS bowl
OU wants to stop skid

By Berry Tramel

Published: December 30, 2007

PHOENIX — The ESPN ticker crawls across the bottom of the screen every few minutes, reminding the American sports fan of Oklahoma football's fallen bowl status.

And it gripes Bob Stoops every time.

Oh, he won't admit it. Stoops would sooner denounce his Cardinal Mooney loyalties than admit the media could sting him.

But the truth hurts. Stoops' own players rat him out. He is peeved at OU's three straight BCS bowl defeats and the constant reminders thereof.

"He's been on that the past few weeks,” said tailback Allen Patrick. "He keeps bringing it up. He's tired of seeing it. Ready to make a change. He really brings that to our attention.”

Quarterback Sam Bradford said Stoops "says he sees it every night on ESPN. He's tired of seeing that.”

Well, Stoops ought to be. It's high time he won a BCS bowl.

Stoops started his OU career with a 3-1 bowl record. All three wins came in January, the lone loss came in December, signaling the Sooners played better the better the bowl.

But now Stoops is 1-3 in his last four bowls. All three losses came in January, the lone win in December.

OU pays Stoops a big batch of money not just to reach big bowls, but to win them.

The Sooners' bowl slump can be easily explained individually. The 21-14 Sugar Bowl loss to LSU came in the Bayou, a homefield disadvantage. The Southern Cal debacle, a 55-19 Orange Bowl drubbing, came against a team for the ages. The 43-42 Boise State epic in the Fiesta Bowl a year ago came via sorcery rarely seen on the gridiron.

But taken as a whole, and you can start to ask, what's the deal? Here's one answer. OU hasn't played well in big bowls. In those three defeats, the Sooners have committed nine turnovers and produced four takeaways.

"You go into the ballgame and turn the ball over, you're going to lose, period,” said Sooner flanker Malcolm Kelly.

This Fiesta is a good matchup for the Sooners. A vulnerable opponent because of a fractured coaching staff. A strategic advantage, too, for OU, since West Virginia relies mostly on the run, a defensive strength of the Sooners since invention of the air pump.

Lose this BCS game, and OU's bowl slump is undeniable. That ESPN ticker will glare like Christmas lights and crawl like a tortoise.

"One year doesn't have anything to do with another,” Stoops said, which is a common-sense thing to say and what most coaches say and what could not be further from the truth. Stoops himself doesn't believe it, because to do so would be to discount tradition.

Tradition is a simple concept. It's the belief that what happened in the past can and will happen in the future.

Overall, OU has a solid bowl tradition. OU's bowl record of 25-15-1 is not America's best but is danged good.

Three games is not a large pool of data. You can't go drawing too many assumptions off three games. But lose to West Virginia, and OU's three-game BCS losing streak rises to four. This is how long streaks are built. One game at a time.

Stoops points out that in BCS bowls, you're running into elite teams. True enough. But so is the opposition.

That's the beauty of bowls. Mostly equal teams matched on a usually neutral field. Doesn't matter if it's the Fiesta or the Insight; over the long haul most schools will hover around .500 in bowls.

Which Stoops has. Just not recently. And when he's reminded of it, it rankles him because he doesn't like to lose and doesn't like to be told what he already knows.

"We have to go out there and take care of business for him,” Patrick said.

That would be a nice gesture. The man needs to watch ESPN in peace.

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