Coming into Saturday's Bedlam football game the Oklahoma State Cowboys were fielding one of their best teams ever while the Sooners had the worst team Oklahoma fans had seen in the last ten years. When the two teams left the field you would have thought that the roles had been reversed after a 27-0 pounding of the 11th ranked Cowboys.
Oklahoma was simply faster, stronger and more aggressive than the Cowboys were on Saturday and it eventually took its toll on Oklahoma State. With many Sooner fans "protesting" Oklahoma's miserable season by not attending (Band Waggoners) several thousand OSU fans took their places by purchasing their tickets only to see their BCS dreams dashed by the complete dismantling of their team. The cocky OSU fan mentality of, "this is the year we finally stick it to them" had faded to the "crap, I can't believe this is happening to us again" mindset by the time the fourth quarter of play had began. Once boisterous, they had nothing to cheer for all day and most of them left early.
Oklahoma's game plan was just this side of genius and the stars aligned for the perfect crimson storm to arise and blow the Cowboys away. On defense they wanted to stuff the run and force Zac Robinson to beat them and that's exactly what they did. Keith Toston entered the game as the Big 12's second leading rusher but was held to just 46 yards. As a team the Cowboys rushed for 62 yards on 29 carries for a very humbling average of 2.1 yards per rush. Unable to move the ball on the ground the Cowboys had to turn to senior quarterback Zac Robinson who failed miserably. Unable to shake the pressure from Oklahoma's defense Robinson produced one of the worst performances by a quarterback in the history of the OSU football program. Before getting yanked in the fourth quarter he completed 9 of 21 passes for 44 yards and a pick.
Oklahoma's defense dominated the line of scrimmage by sacking Robinson twice and recorded 6 tackles for loss. The linebackers aggressively attacked O-State's running backs by heading down hill and meeting them at or near the line of scrimmage. OU's linebackers recorded 19 total tackles. The Sooner secondary blanketed OSU receivers leaving Robinson no targets to throw to resulting in him either trying to force a pass, throw the ball away or tuck and run. None of these options worked exceptionally well as Robinson carried the ball 9 times for -6 yards and the Cowboys didn't move the chains once in the second half and never crossed Oklahoma's 45 yard-line the entire afternoon.
On offense the Sooners wanted to be patient and protect the football. They struggled with both of these in the first quarter but eventually got things rolling and never looked back. DeMarco Murray averaged 5.5 yards per carry and scored twice while Landry Jones completed 54% of his passes for 224 yards. Boosted by exceptional punting (59.3 average) and punt returns (26 yards per return) Oklahoma was patient in playing the field position game until it set them up for scores. At the end of the day the Sooners had run 84 plays and accumulated 367 offensive yards.
This will go down as Oklahoma's signature win of the 2009 season and is a good way to close out what has been a disappointing year. Now with the nation's longest home winning streak at 30 games we wait for a bowl destination and hope that this team can somehow figure out how to produce this type of game away from Norman.
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