Last Thoughts: A Tale of Two Teams?
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 success rates between the first and second halves for the Sooners and their opponents over the first three weeks of the season.
Davis created this dumbbell chart to show the progress of the Sooners’ offense so far this season.
We’ll start from the top and work our way down the chart. The overall success rate for OU dropped after they faced the Tulane Green Wave. This can be explained by the increase of data/plays that the chart is pulling from, and the glaring offensive line/wide receiver mistakes. Each factor has begun to sink the overall success of the offense.
On standard downs, the offense actually increased its success rate. That’s good news. When Oklahoma doesn’t find itself behind the chains the offense is able to lean on what works and pick up first downs.
The offense earned a larger jump in rushing play success rate against a team that will better simulate a SEC defense with their two defensive tackles working against OU’s patchwork offensive live. This jump in success is greatly attributed to the increased focus on Jackson Arnold and the QB run game. Arnold picked up 97 yards and two touchdowns on the ground against the Green Wave.
Passing downs is where the Sooners see the biggest decrease (and the reason success rate has decreased overall) from week two to week three. Even though we see a drop, Davis points out that the offense was actually ahead of the chains much more against Tulane and the sample size of passing downs isn’t that bad of a thing. While OU isn’t converting very well on those downs, the offense is staying out of those downs in the first place.
Next up is the success rate of the Oklahoma’s’ offense from the first half and the second half against both the Houston Cougars and Tulane.
The logos in color are the success rates for the Sooners in the first half and the logos in white are the success rates for their in the second half.
As you can tell, Oklahoma was a poor-performing offense between the two halves against the Cougars. I think that can be explained by a very lackluster offensive game plan and Houston sitting on every single tendency that Oklahoma had shown so far in the season.
The Tulane game shows the real issue for the Sooners. The first half the offense was sitting just shy of a 55% success rate against the Green Wave as Oklahoma simplified the passing scheme, leaned on the QB run game and mixed up their first down play calls. The second half saw Oklahoma completely abandon those ideals and fall back to their “vanilla” play calling that caused so much angst amongst the Sooner hopeful.
OU needs to see Seth Littrell design a 60 minute game plan against the Tennessee Volunteers.
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