Last Thoughts: The Brent Venables Effect
by Payton Guthrie & Davis Dunkleberger
Welcome to Last Thoughts, a weekly article featuring insights from Payton Guthrie & Davis Dunkleberger on the Oklahoma Sooners’ upcoming opponents and other interesting thoughts about the football team.
For this week’s article, Payton & Davis compare the 2023 Oklahoma Sooners against the 2024 Oklahoma Soonersto take a peak at the progress.
Davis created this dumbbell chart to show the direction of the Oklahoma defense has taken from 2023 to (so far) 2024.
The 2024 Oklahoma Sooners are, across the board, a better defensive football team four weeks into the season compare to their position last year. Of course, our eyes tell us that the team is performing better, but the data backs it up!
To make it easier to understand….being on the right is better! The only real “ding” for the 2024 Oklahoma Sooners’ defense is in the Havoc rates. That can be explained away by the fact that the interior defensive line is performing at an amazing level in the Stuff Rate. Simply spoken, Oklahoma is handling business on early downs more often than not and it allows the defense to work within a simpler structure than blitzing or looking to cause chaos.
In 2023 opposing teams had much more success against Oklahoma in the run game that would dictate the Oklahoma Sooners to blitz more often to get off the field.
Even with a lesser Havoc rate the 2024 team is still creating turnovers and holding down team’s possessions.
How do you feel about the 2024 defense and how it has performed so far?
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