STARKVILLE, MS — Owen Heinecke thought he’d avoided the plagues of illness that struck the Sooners this week. Only for the star linebacker to come down sick the day before the game.
After getting “pumped full of meds” and “poked more times than I want to admit,” all Heinecke did was lead the Sooners in tackles in OU’s 23-15 win at Mississippi State on Saturday at Davis Wade Stadium in Starkville.
Who knew cowbells had curing powers?
Every time we think these Sooners are down, they jolt back to life. Then they stumble again. Only to pop right back up.
Lose at Michigan, beat New Mexico. Lose at Georgia, beat Texas. Lose at home to Kentucky, win on the road at Mississippi State.
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Glass half full take: The Sooners refuse to lose two games in a row. That shows some serious grit. Brent Venables and Co. have kept their players bought in.
Glass half empty: Why can’t they string together a couple of good games? Do they have to lose to be motivated to win?
“Proud of our guys … for figuring out how to win a game, somehow, some way,” Venables said to open his postgame news conference. “Made it hard at times. Didn’t have to be as hard.
“You want to have a program, a team, that’s consistent. But, at the end of the day, after incredible disappointment a week ago (where) you felt like for a good part of the game you were the better team … to fight through that, it’s not an easy thing.”
OU had no business losing to Kentucky, but it did. It had even less business letting Mississippi State hang around Saturday. A win is a win, though, right?
OU alternated between six wins and 10 wins in each of Venables’ first four seasons.
Now, in Year 5, the Sooners (4-3) are alternating between wins and losses every week. And they might very well continue to do so on their way to another six-win season, because that’s what the cosmic order requires. But don’t worry. You can bank on 10 wins next year.
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“It is a week-to-week nature, but this game and last game didn’t have to be,” Heinecke said. “We should’ve run them out of the stadium both times. The fact it is a one-possession league shows how thin the margins are, but we’ve gotta be better at choking teams out and running them out of the stadium when we can.”
The Sooners left nine points on the board in Tate Sandell’s three missed field goals. Tight end Rocky Beers caught a touchdown, but he also dropped what would have been another easy one. OU had some bone-headed penalties (but so did Jeff Lebby’s Bulldogs).
Here’s the thing, though. Maybe college football has been fully NFL’ified. When everybody is getting paid, anybody can beat anybody (for the most part). Few teams are great. Few are awful. We’ve seen all kinds of crazy results this week and last. This team beats that team but that team lost to this team, which got trounced by that team, which barely beat that other team.
Just look around. The parity era is here.
Historically for bluebloods like OU, few wins are truly celebrated and every loss is anguished over. It’s time to recalibrate. Put the losses behind you and appreciate every win.
Even if it’s beating a mediocre Mississippi State team that’s missing its starting quarterback, Kamario Taylor.
“It shows that we can fight back, but now we’ve got to punch again,” Sooner safety Peyton Bowen said of OU’s every-other-week pattern. “It can’t always be, ‘Oh we lost, now we can win.’ We’ve got to keep punching every single game.”
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Heinecke was among the slew of Sooners fighting the flu and who knows what else, but he seemed to have a harder time getting over an imperfect win.
“We respond really well,” Heinecke said.
But …
“We want to get to a point where we’re not having to respond, where we’re just choking teams out and winning,” he said. “This team wants to win and we’re so close. We played better football today, but still not good enough. It’s not up to the standard, but it will be.”
What could be a third six-win season in five years is not the OU standard. We know that.
But when the entire sport is shifting, does the standard not have to follow suit?
We used to wonder what next year would bring. Now we have no clue what to expect next week.
Joe Mussatto is a sports columnist for The Oklahoman. Have a story idea for Joe? Email him at jmussatto@oklahoman.com. Support Joe's work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today at subscribe.oklahoman.com.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: OU football is a different team week-to-week. So is everybody else | Mussatto