Published: October 07, 2007 01:15 am            

Sooners won the way they had to

Commentary

DALLAS — Stepping up.

Bearing down. Making plays. Representing.

Go ahead and pick your favorite cliché, the one that explains how some team or, really, how some guys on the team did all the things they had to do to come out on top, because that’s how Oklahoma did it Saturday afternoon at the Cotton Bowl.

The macro picture was clear.

Lose and forget about the Big 12.

Lose and you’re 0-2 in the conference and 0-3 against Texas the last three seasons. Lose and you’re in freefall, wondering when it ends.

Only this wasn’t a macro game. Maybe it never is, but it sure wasn’t Saturday. This was a micro game or, if there’s a word smaller than micro that means the same thing, it was that.

Because OU’s 28-21 victory wasn’t so much about the defense as it was Curtis Lofton, two weeks after making 14 tackles at Tulsa and one after making 16 in Boulder, stripping the ball from Jamaal Charles so Gerald McCoy could fall on it with a play that wasn’t sort of like scoring a touchdown, but exactly like it, because, coming inside the 5, it kept one off the board.

“I thought (that) was probably the play of the game,” Bob Stoops said.

For its absolute singularity, it wasn’t so unlike Roy Williams’ leap of faith way back when. Only it won’t be remembered that way because it had competition.

DeMarco Murray put the Sooners on top with a third-quarter bolt of lightning that will be replayed and replayed because Joe Jon Finley had moved a Longhorn out of the way but not himself, which only gave Murray an opportunity to break into the open through the air, like Bill Johnson coming around a turn in Sarajevo.

It didn’t end there for Murray. With Allen Patrick ailing, the Las Vegas redshirt freshman was the man getting all the hard inside yards, too. Just don’t forget the bolt because, at the time, it was everything.

Or Sam Bradford, playing in the spotlight of the Texas State Fair for the very first time. He might not have been Colt McCoy’s superior only because McCoy maybe played the best game of his life, yet facing a tie game and 94 yards to victory, Bradford took out his scalpel and carved Texas up.

It wasn’t his 21 of 32 passing with no picks and three scores for 244 yards that put the Sooners over the top, but that drive, when he completed 7 of 8 for 83 yards, the incompletion a Quentin Chaney drop and the touchdown, a 35-yarder to Malcolm Kelly, requiring his standing in the pocket just to be clobbered.

The game took almost 31?2 hours. The drive, in real time, took 7 or 8 minutes, and Bradford owned them when he had to own them.

Coaching can only take you so far.

A fantastic game plan can win a championship, but it’s never a guarantee. All the motivation in the world can make somebody play hard, but not necessarily well.

Well, the game tied and Texas driving through the red zone, coaching wasn’t going to save the Sooners.

The game tied and Patrick laid up on the bench and coaching isn’t going to get anybody from here to there in a flash when here to there is 65 yards.

The game tied again and coaching sure isn’t going to move the ball 94 yards down the field and break Texas’ back along the way.

But a couple or three guys just doing it can.

“You always need that,” Stoops said.

Maybe not against North Texas, Miami, Utah State or Tulsa, but you tend to at the Red River Rivalry and you had to have it this time around, the day Texas found itself after so much aimlessness to play plenty well enough to take down its 10th-ranked archrival.

“I thought it was a great football game,” Mack Brown said. “It’s what you expect out of Texas and OU.”

And lo and behold, there it was.

It wasn’t there last week when any one guy might have changed everything and kicked Colorado’s snowball off course, but it was there Saturday, time and again, on the biggest regular-season stage the Sooners and Longhorns will ever play on, every season.

It was there when Auston English sacked McCoy, chasing him down, finally making it clear, 300 passing yards later, the sophomore signal-caller had finished making things happen; just as it had been there earlier the play before the punt that preceded Murray’s bolt, because that was the play English stopped Texas fullback Chris Obonnaya for no gain while the Longhorns faced third-and-1. Don’t forget that one.

It’s a team game. That never changes. And the pack can do plenty and already has. The pack might get it done against Missouri next week. That’s just not how it happened at the Cotton Bowl.

Saturday at the Texas State Fair it took stepping out of the pack at the precise moment the stepping out occurred.

Stepping out?

Add it to the list; the list of clichés, those time honored descriptions that explain how things happen, how OU beat Texas.

Clay Horning

366-3526

cfhorning@normantranscript.com

        

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