'We’ll certainly take them': Why an early wake-up call turned OU's defensive fortunes around vs. WVU

NORMAN — OU defensive coordinator Alex Grinch wasn’t about to take anything away from his defense after it caught a break Saturday.

“You take the lumps when a tip ball or something like that goes in the offense’s favor,” Grinch said after the Sooners pulled out yet another skin-of-their-teeth win, this one 16-13 over West Virginia. “Believe me, I wished that happened more often with some of those scenarios. We’ll certainly take them.”

OU got a big break late when Mountaineers center Zack Frazier’s snap whizzed past an unexpecting Jarret Doege, setting off a race between Doege and Sooners’ rush linebacker Nik Bonitto for the ball.

Doege — with a five-yard headstart — won that heat, falling on the ball 21 yards behind the line of scrimmage, but the damage was done. The Mountaineers were starting to creep inside Casey Legg’s field-goal range before back-to-back miscues by Frazier, the first a penalty for an illegal snap after Frazier hesitated for a moment after beginning his motion. After those mistakes, though, West Virginia punted the ball back to the Sooners, for what proved to be the game-winning drive.

OU needed a break to get itself there, but Grinch’s group made plenty of their own breaks.

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The Sooners held the Mountaineers to 226 total yards, the lowest yardage for West Virginia in two seasons.

The Mountaineers ran for only 47 yards — though that number was skewed a bit by the fourth-quarter touch of Sooner Magic that bailed out a defense that had bailed out its offense repeatedly.

For years, talk has centered on when the Sooners’ defense would be able to carry its own weight and stop being dragged along by OU’s otherworldly offense.

Now, it’s the defense bailing out an offense that still has a ways to go to give the Sooners hope of making the College Football Playoff, much less competing once there.

“It was great,” quarterback Spencer Rattler said. “They always come through for us. Especially in these first four games, they’ve played really well and bring a lot of energy. We need to do that on the offensive side, too.”

For a little more than 12 minutes to start the game, things almost looked like they were reverting to what had been status quo.

The Mountaineers chewed up more than nine minutes of clock on their game-opening touchdown drive, three times converting on third down and once on fourth down to keep the drive alive.

“It was tough to take to the chin obviously,” defensive lineman Isaiah Thomas said. “Because we don’t have to have a wake up call to get things going.”

But it did.

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Members of the defense got together after that scoring drive and challenged each other to keep the Mountaineers to just that single touchdown, and to hold West Virginia under 100 yards rushing.

Mission accomplished.

West Virginia’s offense sputtered the rest of the way, with Delarrin Turner-Yell picking off Doege on the Mountaineers’ second drive, punting five times and twice scratching across field goals.

“We felt that the first touchdown was a fluke and that we could prove that throughout the rest of the game,” Thomas said. “And obviously it was fun to be out there.”

Grinch often tells his players, ‘You can’t beat Oklahoma scoring threes.’ 

With the Sooners’ offense struggling, that adage nearly didn’t hold up, but in the end, it worked.

“At the end of the day, we’re Oklahoma,” Bonitto said. “We’re taking everybody’s best shot. No game is — we’re gonna walk in and whoop everybody by 30. No one is going to do that. This is everybody’s Super Bowl when we play them. We’re going to get everybody’s best shot. We have to do our best job to respond. At the end of the day, we have to get the dub, and that’s what we did tonight.”