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Is Oklahoma really that good? Don't see it on the stats.
Dec 7, 2015, 5:35 PM
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The eyeballs say: "Oklahoma is playing the best football in the country right now."
Not sure I buy it.
Oklahoma is ranked #7 in the nation in total offense, which is impressive...until you consider the second question: who have they played? Because that #7 overall ranking on O puts them only at #4 overall in total offense in the Big 12...behind Baylor, Texas Tech, and TCU.
So I did the digging, and came up with this: Oklahoma has played the following defenses:
Akron (#17 overall)
Tennessee (#46 overall)
Tulsa (#125 overall)
West Virginia (#55 overall)
Texas (#107 overall)
Kansas State (#100 overall)
Texas Tech (#126 overall)
Kansas (#127 overall, worst in college football - allowed 560 YARDS PER GAME!!!)
Iowa State (#108 overall)
Baylor (#59 overall)
TCU (#66 overall)
Oklahoma State (#95 overall)
Uh...OK, Oklahoma. So you played just two defenses in the Top-50 overall, and managed to play the three worst defenses in FCS (Kansas, Texas Tech, Tulsa) this year. That's some spectacularly crappy opposition. The best defense you faced was Akron - Akron! - at #17 overall.
Clemson, in contrast, ranks #12 in total offense. But we amassed those stats against Boston College (#1 overall), App State (#12 overall), Louisville (#13 overall), FSU (#15 overall), NC State (#19 overall), Notre Dame (#38 overall), and Wake Forest (#39 overall)...almost all of whom have better defenses than Oklahoma, which ranks just #31 overall in total D.
Clemson ranks seventh.
We also have three wins over Top-10 opponents, Oklahoma none. Their best wins were over a Baylor team reduced to its third-string QB, a crippled TCU team missing a myriad of starters, and an Oklahoma State team that just plain was never that good to begin with.
Not sure how anybody, including Vegas or ESPN's fuzzy "FPI", somehow projects that Oklahoma is the better team...or that Oklahoma somehow has a 67% chance of winning.
The bottom line is that if Clemson's defense plays well, they are a significantly better defense - actually a couple orders of magnitude better - than anybody Oklahoma has played all year. They will likely have trouble moving the ball.
Contrariwise, there is no indicator whatsoever that Oklahoma's D will present Clemson's offense with any particular problems moving the ball. They managed to make Cole Stoudt look like a Heisman candidate last year; while they've improved some this year they are not a Top-25 defense...and Clemson actually has a legit Heisman candidate under center this year.
Oklahoma looks, per the stats, like a bit of an inflated paper tiger, if you'll pardon the term. I would posit they are a better team than last year and the stats reflect this; but are they any better than, say, UNC? The stats do not show this. In particular the lack of quality defenses they have faced raises serious questions about how well Oklahoma will fare against Clemson's pass rush, especially since in the one game they lost - Texas - they got thoroughly whipped on the line of scrimmage.
Clemson is much better on the LOS than Texas is.
The bottom line is that the Big 12 has been pretty terrible the last few years, thin in both numbers and quality...and they managed to manufacture four "Top 10" teams per the rankings by playing absolutely nobody outside themselves and getting a bunch of teams unbeaten into December...whereupon they duly ended up wiping each other out. But when you watch Big 12 defenses in particular you see they're absolutely awful, and there's very little in the resumes of these Big 12 teams that suggest they're really any better than middle-of-the-pack SEC or ACC teams like NC State or Ole Miss. It just isn't exposed - at least until bowl season - because for the last few years they just plain don't play anybody.
Oklahoma's best OOC win? At Tennessee. And that required an almost miraculous fourth-quarter comeback. And that was, by a fairly significant margin, the Big 12's best OOC victory of the entire season.
So I'm not following what Vegas or FPI are seeing. I'm not sold Oklahoma is any better than UNC.
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