re: Oklahoma after Alex Grinch

There is a talent deficiency; however, the talent is much better than a defense ranked in the 100s. OU has many 4 and even a few 5 star players on that side of the ball. I’m excited about this hire.

I’m not claiming that will win every game, but would at least give us a chance against the better teams. We didn’t really stand a chance, outside of a miracle, to beat either Alabama or Clemson this year.

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That won’t change next year. Watching the game, the secondary couldn’t cover. The players recruited had 4 stars but they were overrated. I remember watching Norwood thinking that kid just doesn’t have the hips to be a good corner. Then guys like Gumbs were busts. Criddell is your highest ranked defensive player. He is ranked very generously. It’s going to take time to sort out the hot mess.

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How many OU games have you watched in the last five or ten years?

There has been no coaching. No in game adjustments. No progression from week to week, or season to season. You never saw a light bulb come on for a kid that would make you think that he'd been being coached up all week. Defensive players simply haven't developed at all.

There is certainly a talent deficiency. Who would want to come spend four years floating aimlessly along not getting any better?

Not withstanding any individual's recruiting ranking, the team should take a big step forward if they are coached.

For Oklahoma to be one of the worst in FBS. There has to poor evaluation on top of bad scheme and development. Talented players come in and make a difference day 1. That’s not coaching.

Grinch will make a difference in year one but will be capped by talent.

So we were just picking the worst 4 and 5 stars available?
They've been recruiting well on that side of the ball, not loaded but cup isn't bare. It's way more coaching than it is talent.
It won't happen overnight, but a competent coach should have immediate impact.

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I think the dude can coach. I just don’t know how much he moves the needle in recruiting.

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Who cares how much a DC can recruit? The #1 most important thing about a DC should be if he is a good coach. Hire good recruiters as position coaches, but you need an elite defensive scheme if you want to be an elite defense.

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That won’t change next year. Watching the game, the secondary couldn’t cover

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Could try and mix some different concepts in to create some turnovers. Put some pressure on Bama as opposed to on your DBs who were getting picked apart.

If OU had started faster (they obviously didn't) then they wouldn't need too many stops in a game. Gamble a couple times, hope for good results and if not, you were probably giving up 7 anyway

Nah, you're getting scored on anyway. Have to be agressive and hope for some turnovers or big negative plays.

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Watching Norwood, did he show you anything that suggested he was being used incorrectly? He was small, slow and not very quick in and out of his breaks.

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To me, one game is not a substantial enough sample size to judge a coach's affect on an individual player.

You look at Norwood and see that he is small, slow, and not very quick in and out of his breaks. All of these are accurate observations. Similar observations apply across the board in looking at our defensive roster, with a few exceptions.

To measure the affect of a coach on an individual player, you need to look at player development game over game and season over season. Outside of a talent deficiency, this is where OU has been a massive failure. We have had good, but not great, players consistently on defense in the past five or ten years. Very few, if any, of these players have left OU as better players than they were when they got here. These guys aren't excelling at the fundamentals of their positions. This is absolutely not the case for our offensive players.

You have guys like Jordan Thomas, who after his sophmore year was looked at as a potential All American and early draft pick the next year. Instead of getting better, he regressed. There was no coaching.

Another area where OU has been an abject failure is at in-game adjustments. They just don't happen. At all. Look at the Bama game as an example. They absolutely killed us on slants the entire night and we never veered from the plan that we set before the game. It's a terrible way to go about things.

Finally, I completely disagree with you about how OU should have approached this game. We needed to attack them and try to come up with big plays. We were lame and didn't come close to doing it.

We weren't ever going to stop Bama's RPO game with any sort of consistency with our defense this year. We needed to be aggressive as hell and get a big turnover or two and we needed our office to be humming from the word go. We didn't do either of these things.

The OU coaches are conservative and don't blitz near enough for my liking. By all reports, Grinch runs (and will run) a defensive scheme that is more aggressive. I think if our game plan was slightly different, we could have successfully taken the ball away a few times. I think with adequate coaching throughout the offseason and season, our players would have been fundamentally sound, made tackles, and finished plays.