Oklahoma Football Hot Links: Sooners travel to Lubbock

What’s good?

Hope you all ate your fill of turkey, ham and casseroles of all kinds.

Sometimes there are things that pop up that, months later, you just are kicking yourself for not looking into more.

After Brent’s contract became public from an FOIA request that was made, one nugget surfaced that we all deemed strange but not relevant. Brent, in year one, had a ‘seven regular season games won’ bonus. We all assumed that this was written in as an easily obtainable goal to put some extra Christmas money in the head man’s pockets, which truthfully is the most likely reason.

But what if it wasn’t? What if it was a preseason acknowledgment of how far this team was from good? What if the writing was on the wall with Brent and Joe C when this contract negotiation began? That would make us all feel pretty dumb though, right? How did we not take that for what it was, an honest win projection?

I have thought about that a lot since the Morgantown loss — maybe I was simply naive in seeing that Oklahoma football was telling me exactly what they thought about Oklahoma football. After a Thanksgiving drive to the in-laws with a sleeping baby in the car during which I was required to pass the time with simply my own thoughts... I came to this line of thinking.

I still think that bonus was written in as a layup. However, if it wasn’t, and that’s what Brent thought was a fair prediction for this team, we probably should’ve been paying more attention!

OU Links

• I am not going to pretend to know anything going on but.. this isn’t a great story. Daniel Parker was a fun story this offseason with the “best blocking TE in college football” thing but honestly, why is he still on the team?
• The big story for this Oklahoma team is how completely inept they are on third down the past two weeks. For West Virginia, blame the weather if you want, but there isn’t much of an excuse for what happened in Bedlam. Add in the fact that this coaching staff clearly never played Madden to practice their clock management, it leads to tough questions which frankly... I don’t know if we have been given good answers.
• INCYM, Porter Moser’s OUMBB team seems to be finding its groove. Grant Sherfield is living up to the hype, and we’ll see if he and the Sooners can keep it going against Ole Miss on Sunday.

• NIL is the game, Brent knows it. Normally I am a big ‘let me just tell you what he said’ guy... but I think I am going to let Brent speak for himself here. His quotes below are interesting.

• Oklahoma defensive line seems to have help on the way, this coming at the cost of the Notre Dame fighting Irish. Former four-star defensive lineman Jacob Lacey made his commitment to the Sooners known.

• Justin Broiles suffered a scary injury against West Virginia, and we weren’t sure that he was going to be able to play again this season and maybe again in his career. However, Broiles was better off than initially hoped and played a great game against Oklahoma State.
• Like Oz, the wizard, Matt Wells has been quietly hanging behind the curtain. Wells, coming off a quick firing at Texas Tech, has been helping Brent’s staff behind the scenes and offering advice when asked. What was it like to add Wells to the staff? Eric Bailey tells us the story.
• Tramel is calling for an Oklahoma victory this weekend, so why the positivity heading into Lubbock? FWIW, he also picked Oklahoma State to win, and that did not work out.
• I don’t want to see another alternate until these uniforms make their way back out there.

Anything else going on?

• Lance Leipold is sticking around Lawerence and trying to get the vultures down somewhere else. Big win for the Jayhawks and honestly, I am glad. Kansas being basically a bye week wasn’t fun. The jokes got stale (with one exception) and the games were boring. Give me this frisky Jayhawk team any day of the week.

• Berry Trammel lays it out here, USC stands a decent chance to make the college football playoff. Notre Dame and Oregon won’t be push overs but Lincoln Riley is close to doing exactly what he did in year one at Oklahoma. How do Sooner fans proccess that reality?
• If you aren’t watching USA and cheering for the red, white and blue, its basically like telling me you don’t chew Big Red. (if you get the joke, good. If you don’t, get cultured)