Boyd Street Dec Magazine

Sooner Magic by Chris Plank

It was a party in Waco, Texas, and for good reason. The Baylor Bears were making a statement early with a dominating performance on national television against the Oklahoma Sooners. The Bears were trying to place themselves into the Big 12 Championship conversation, but also into the National Championship conversation.

But, just as the party was reaching its crescendo at McClane Stadium, the Sooners whipped up an improbable batch of Sooner Magic that left the Baylor Bears looking for answers.

It was a come-from-behind ending the Sooner Nation had never seen before. This is the story of one of the wildest days in Sooner football history with twists and turns, dizzying highs, preceded by soul crushing lows. Somehow, in the end, it all came together to give the Sooners a memorable triumph.

PREGAME MYSTERY

The Sooners are familiar with the media circus surrounding ESPN’s College Gameday broadcasts, and OU was making its 37th appearance in the featured game. With Baylor sitting at 9-0, this was the biggest match-up of the 2019 Big 12 season.

Lee Corso donned the Bear mascot head with guest pickers Chip and Joanna Gaines projecting a Baylor win. As soon as Gameday signed off, the rumors started.

Talented Sooner wide receiver and Biletnikoff Award semi-finalist, CeeDee Lamb might not play. As kickoff drew closer, the rumors intensified. A report from The Oklahoma Daily student newspaper listed Lamb as questionable and any flame of concern was fanned into a full-fledged, five-alarm fire.

But in one of the day’s first odd twists, Lamb participated in pre-game warmups. He was dancing, catching passes, going through drills. He looked ready, but unfortunately, he was not.

“Ceedee Lamb will not play tonight,” Sooner Radio Network sideline analyst Gabe Ikard said, moments before kickoff. “The decision has been made to hold him out.”

It sent shockwaves through the Sooner Nation and even surprised the ABC/ ESPN broadcast team.

“You don’t often have a player who is ruled out medically sit down and do a feature for GameDay, do a phone call with Maria Taylor, go through warmups with pads on,” Chris Fowler said on the broadcast. Analyst Kirk Herbstreit responded, “I’ve never seen that.”

Lamb has become the Sooner offense this season, and now, a young receiving group would have to step up against the physical Baylor defense. As the pre-game invocation wrapped up, it became glaringly obvious the Sooners were in for an interesting night.

COULD NOT HAVE GONE ANY WORSE

The circus that surrounded the build up to kick-off was quickly old news, thanks to a traditional fast start for Oklahoma. Defensively, the Sooners forced a first drive punt for the 10th straight game and jumped on top thanks to a Gabe Brkic field goal 3-0.

Then the bottom fell out.

Baylor proceeded to score touchdowns on its next four possessions, grabbing a 28-3 lead. During that stretch, the Sooners ran just 16 offensive plays for 56 yards and turned the ball over twice.

Jalen Hurts fumbled and then threw an interception to fuel the Baylor run. McClane Stadium was electric. The crowd was roaring as the stadium big screen trolled the Sooners with messages like “OK, Boomer” and 50,000-plus fans sang in unison to the popular song “Truth Hurts.” Add in a shot mocking the crashing of the Sooner Schooner, and the only thing lacking from the first half celebration would have been storming the field and tearing down the goalposts.

But the Sooners did not panic. On the sidelines, there was no finger pointing and no doubt, at least not outwardly. Lincoln Riley, with his team down 28-3, brought the entire team to a huddle to get everyone’s mind right.

“I said at that time we had 41 minutes left in the game. I didn’t want us to panic,” Riley said. “I knew we were going to fight our tails off. You just knew that. Our team knew that. They felt that.”

Riley also had a message for his quarterback, and it resonated. “I told him that I think we’re moving it well at this point,” Riley said. “Hold on to the damn ball. Score every drive.”

A SECOND HALF FOR THE AGES

Hurts was still struggling. He was playing the worst game of his short OU career, and the Sooners’ defense had allowed points on five consecutive Baylor possessions. Even though the Sooners exited to the halftime locker room trailing 31-10, team confidence was surprisingly high.

“It’s gonna be one hell of a story one day to tell our kids,” Sooner Defensive Coordinator Alex Grinch told Hurts as they took the field for the second half.

“Just add another one to the list,” Hurts responded. “One of many.”

In fact, Grinch had prepared the Sooners in a round-about way for what it would take to dig out of a hole. Cornerback Parnell Motley mentioned that the team was shown a clip of the New England Patriots overcoming a 28-3 deficit during Super Bowl 51 last week. It is the largest comeback in Super Bowl history. But, why were they shown that?

“Because our last game (against Iowa State), things didn’t really go our way. We were up 35-14, but it’s the way we went about things. It showed us how to face adversity,” Motley said. “We just found a way. Seeing how a Super Bowl team responded in that situation, we looked at the scoreboard the same way.”

The Sooners scored on their opening drive of the second half to cut the score to 31-17.

SOONER MAGIC

But then, it happened.

The Sooners had played five straight games without forcing a turnover and, if you include the two first-half turnovers, the Sooners had a negative nine turn- over ratio in that same stretch.

But on Baylor’s first offensive play of the second half, the Sooners finally forced a takeaway. Parnell Motley punched the ball out of the hands of JaMycal Hasty and the fumble was recovered by Pat Fields.

“It was a big relief for me,” Grinch said. “We say takeaways, because you’re not just hoping the ball bounces your way. Hope isn’t a strategy. We’ll take those, too, believe me. What takeaways are as much as anything, they obviously create possessions. We’ve got a pretty good of- fense here. If we got one more posses- sion, two more possessions, imagine if we got three more possessions with that offense every week, what we could be as a football program.”

For Ronnie Perkins, it changed the entire energy of the sideline.

“It created a whole bunch of energy. We’re in a place like this all alone. It’s just us for each other,” Perkins said. “It definitely changed the whole energy. It got us excited to go play again and get out on the field. Coaches kept us fo- cused. We kept swinging and kept play- ing. As players, we never lost hope.”

The Sooners failed to cash in on that first takeaway, but the tone had been set. The Sooner defense was on the attack. Per- kins tackled Baylor quarterback Charlie Brewer for a loss to start the next Baylor offensive series.

“The biggest thing we talked about as a team was belief and keeping the faith,” Sooner linebacker Kenneth Murray said. “That’s what we told guys. ‘Keep your head up. Continue to keep the faith. As long as you keep faith, everything’s go- ing to be OK.’ We knew it. We all continued to buy in, then everything would work out in our favor.”

“We had 30 minutes to do what we got- ta do, 30 minutes of hell,” Motley added. “It felt really great to come out and score, get a turnover and man, that’s how you feed off the momentum. If you think about it, we started the opposite way in the first half. In the second half, we turned things around and fed off that momentum.

After the initial fumble recovery by Fields, Hurts would fumble again turning it over for the third time. This time he was a step away from walking into the end zone. Despite these challenges and playing without his biggest weapon, Hurts and his young crew of receivers responded.

Oklahoma proceeded to score on its final three possessions and turned what was once a 28-3 deficit into a 34-31 lead with 1:45 to go. The party in McLane stadium for those donning the green and gold suddenly crashed.

“I learned a lot about our team this week,” Riley said. “When we got down, I really believed we had the comeback in us. Now, it’s still hard to do. There’s no doubt about that, especially against a good team.”

With the comeback complete, the victory was far from secure, and to add to the wild nature of the day, the final defensive stand had to have at least one nail-biting moment. On first-and-10 at OU’s 40, Oklahoma linebacker Nik Bonitto dropped a potentially game-clinching interception. Then, on second down, he secured the interception and the win for the Sooners.

“After I dropped the first one, the first person I thought of was coach Ruf (Ruffin McNeill) because we do ball drills every day before practice. I knew he was going to talk to me about it,” Bonnito said. “But I knew when the second one came around, I had to make a play for my team. I knew I had to come down with it. My brothers needed me.”

Final score: Oklahoma 34, Baylor 31.

It was the biggest comeback in Oklahoma football history. The Sooners trailed by 25 points with five minutes left in the second quarter, by 21 points at halftime.

“I made this clear to my brothers, everyone in that locker room. I’m virtually the new guy around here,” Hurts said after the game. “These are the same guys that accepted me the way that they did, voted me as captain, basically said we’re going to follow Jalen. And, that means more than you know. Tonight, we’re out there battling, and their leader made some mistakes and we all found ways to overcome it together. Shows the character we have, the perseverance we have.”

“Our best ball,” Riley said, “is coming soon. We kind of found ourselves a little bit.”

The wild day and memorable night were perhaps best summed up by Sooner play-by-play announcer Toby Rowland after Bonnito’s interception.

“In Waco Texas, Lincoln Riley took a house in disrepair and refurbished it into their own palace on the Banks of the Brazos. Unbelievable.”

It was a game that defined what Sooner Magic is all about, and it showed once again that Oklahoma football never gives up, regardless of how tall the odds are. – BSM