Season of the question mark

By Clay Horning, Sports Editor
The Norman Transcript

August 31, 2005 01:08 am

— Bob Stoops did not re-reference the 2000 Sooners. He could have, but the Oklahoma coach, ready to begin his seventh season on the Owen Field sideline Saturday, steered clear.
Perhaps, as the season gets closer, national-title comparisons to the last OU team with so few household names serves less and less a purpose.
Who needs to be saddled with such expectations?
Or maybe, for the first time this preseason, it slipped his mind.
No matter. It’s clear.
Not that OU will make another trip to the Rose Bowl, this time to play for all the marbles a third straight year. Rather, this is the season of the question mark.
How will the Sooners be at quarterback?
Even if we know who it’s going to be all season, which I think we might, it’s still a good question.
How about the offensive line? Another good question.
The receivers? Well, if three freshman are going to play — and Stoops let it be known at Tuesday’s weekly media luncheon Malcolm Kelly, Manuel Johnson and Juaquin Iglesias won’t spend any time redshirting — it’s hard to know if that’s good, bad or indifferent.
If those are some of your questions, understand Stoops’ own queries take form long before he starts thinking about this or that player, this or that position.
“You want to see what you are. How competitive are we? How tough are we? What’s our attitude?” he said. “What’s the players’ demeanor, in the locker room (and) coming out of the tunnel? What’s the discipline level that we have here?”
Heck, those are good questions, too.
Take a look at the depth chart.
Chris Chester and Akim Millington are 40 percent of the offensive line.
In the secondary, it’s D.J. Wolfe and Chijioke Onyenegecha at the corners and Lewis Baker and Darien Williams at the safeties. True freshman Nic Harris will come in for the nickel packages.
Two stars return on defense: Dusty Dvoracek and Rufus Alexander. And Dvoracek, still coming back from surgery to repair a torn biceps, is not yet starting.
Two stars returns on offense: Davin Joseph and Adrian Peterson.
Unless you count J.D. Runnels and Travis Wilson, but it’s hard to call a guy who touches the ball so rarely, or one who’s never been a No. 1 receiver, a star. Really good players, sure. But not yet stars.
Question marks?
They’re everywhere.
Not that it’s a bad thing.
Anticipation, in many endeavors, is half the fun.
“I’m ready to find out. This is my last go round,” offensive lineman Kelvin Chaisson said. “Like half the freshmen, I can’t remember their names.”
But he’ll learn them, because about half the freshmen will be playing; so many that after Stoops listed about seven, he needed assistance.
“Who else?” he said to the media. “Help me out.”
The Sooners enter the season ranked No. 7 by the Associated Press, which even without BCS input, remains the most respected poll in the nation (at least as long as Terry Bradshaw and Gene Bartow vote in the Harris Poll).
Nothing wrong with No. 7.
OU could win every game. Or it could lose two or three.
And seventh is none too far back to approach the top as others drop.
But we just don’t know.
We don’t even know, not really, what a great season would be and what a down season would be.
“I think at a program with such a great legacy like this, we have a tradition to uphold,” Wolfe said.
No doubt about that, nor that these Sooners will play hard to uphold it.
And still, we know so little.
So many question marks.
Not that it’s a bad thing.
Gives you something to look forward to long before the Texas State Fair.
Clay Horning366-3526cfhorning@normantranscript.com