Sooner Magic — it’s what Oklahoma found in the 2001 Orange Bowl, and it’s what the Sooners will try to recapture when they face the Clemson Tigers in the 2015 Orange Bowl, which doubles as a College Football Playoff semifinal.
The Orange Bowl is simultaneously the place of Oklahoma’s greatest triumphs and its most stinging defeats as a program. The all-time leader in Orange Bowl apperances with 19, Oklahoma has positioned itself to experience supreme glory or enduring heartbreak in Miami. It’s very much a first-world college football problem, but as this latest Orange Bowl arrives, OU’s failures in South Florida are more recent than its crowning moment under head coach Bob Stoops.
*
The Sooners played for three national championships in Miami during the Bowl Championship Series era, once under the label of the BCS National Championship Game (in 2009 versus Florida) and twice under the Orange Bowl banner in 2001 and 2005. Filtered solely through the prism of Heisman Trophy winners, each of OU’s last three postseason visits to Miami have been drenched in history. The fact that each contest wasn’t merely a bowl game, but a championship prizefight, lifted those three events to a very high place in the college football pantheon.
Consider this about Oklahoma’s 21st-century “three-pack” in Miami: All three games — the 2001 Orange Bowl, the 2005 Orange Bowl, and the 2009 BCS National Championship Game — featured a matchup between quarterbacks who had finished either first or second in the Heisman Trophy voting. In the cases of the 2005 Orange and the 2009 BCS title game, the past two Heisman Trophy winners faced each other, with one of the winners finishing third in a separate season.
The facts:
In the 2001 Orange Bowl, 2000 Heisman winner Chris Weinke of Florida State met that year’s runner-up, Josh Heupel of OU. In the 2005 Orange Bowl, 2004 Heisman winner Matt Leinart of USC faced 2003 Heisman winner Jason White. The Oklahoma quarterback finished third in the 2004 Heisman race. In the 2009 BCS title game, 2008 Heisman winner Sam Bradford represented Oklahoma. He stared down 2007 Heisman winner Tim Tebow of Florida. Tebow had finished third in the 2008 voting for the award.
Oklahoma simply has a way of finding college football history, and vice-versa. Miami is the location where a program and a sport’s defining moments most commonly intersect.
As the 2015 Orange Bowl arrives, Oklahoma hopes for a reaffirmation of Bob Stoops’s most important victory as a head coach. At the same time, OU attempts to snip away the common thread which binds together each of the Sooners’ three title-game appearances in Miami this century.
*
In the 2001 Orange Bowl, Oklahoma faced a decorated ACC quarterback who entered that contest on a roll. Chris Weinke led Florida State to at least 30 points in six straight games and nine out of ten.
A decade and a half later, Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson will take the field against the Sooners in Miami after leading his team to at least 30 points in four straight games and eight of nine.
Heading into the 2001 Orange Bowl, Weinke and Florida State had met very little resistance in the ACC. The Seminoles did receive a tough test from Georgia Tech in the 2000 season, and unlike Clemson, they did lose a regular season game (to Miami, then in the Big East), but overall, FSU encountered fewer close shaves. The Noles didn’t play as close to the margins as Clemson did.
The conventional wisdom on Seminoles-Sooners was that Weinke — while perhaps not in position to dominate the way he had on many occasions during the regular season — would eventually find enough openings in Oklahoma’s defense to prevail. Such a view doesn’t apply as pervasively to Watson and Clemson, but that line of thought certainly exists, even from one of our Student Section columnists, who follows the OU program very closely:
my tentative conclusion after putting this together on oklahoma-clemson: wrong team is favored https://t.co/JjexxGrwFl
— Allen Kenney (@BlatantHomerism) December 16, 2015
Clemson’s offense struggled in the first month of the season, needing to work out the kinks and find its rhythm. Watson found that rhythm in the middle of the season, and while Florida State blunted the Tigers’ attack on Nov. 7, Clemson’s offense thrived in nearly every other game it played from mid-October onward. Watson is an in-form player, much as Weinke was when the 2001 Orange Bowl approached.
The Sooners shut out Weinke and the rest of the Florida State offense.
Can OU do the same to Clemson? It would be just as improbable a feat, if not more.
*
Oklahoma isn’t likely to smother Watson — partly because the sport has become even more friendly to offenses, and partly because Clemson does not have the Mark Richt situation Florida State faced when it played the Sooners. There is no lame-duck coordinator on the Tigers’ staff, no play-caller who has one foot out the door before taking over as the head coach at another school. Richt — now employed by the University of Miami — just might make his way to Sun Life Stadium to see this game. Should he attend, it will be very hard for him to not think back to the night when the Florida State portion of his career came to a close.
What’s a reasonable expectation for the Sooners’ defense in this latest rendezvous with the Orange Bowl and college football history? Let’s put it this way: If Oklahoma can merely limit Clemson to 24 points — even 27 or 28 — it should feel good about its chances.
Aspirations are all well and good, but such a statement recalls the darker part of OU’s recent title-game history in Miami. If the Sooners succeeded in South Florida on a big stage in the 2001 Orange Bowl, the next visits in 2005 and 2009 represented a very different story, one Bob Stoops intends to reverse on the final day of 2015.
*
Even when OU outplayed Florida State at the end of the 2000 season, its offense hardly flourished. The Sooners — in their last three Miami-based heavyweight title bouts — have failed to score 20 points. Many weeks of success and continuity in October and November run into an extended December break. On the other side of this disruption of the regular routines athletes crave, OU’s offenses don’t fare well in Miami. This is the piece of the puzzle the Sooners have to solve.
It’s not as though the clash between Clemson’s offense and Oklahoma’s defense is peripheral to the outcome of this game. However, the other matchup — the Tigers’ defense against the Sooners’ offense — seems even more central to the proceedings.
Oklahoma certainly needed to sort itself out on defense this year, and coordinator Mike Stoops has carried out that fundamental task. Yet, the Sooners were just as lost and disorganized on offense when 2014 ended. Scoring only six points against a much more experienced Clemson defense (the Tigers returned only three defensive starters this season) in the 2014 Russell Athletic Bowl offered convincing and final proof that a staff shakeup was necessary. Stoops brought in Lincoln Riley as his offensive coordinator; gave him Baker Mayfield to work with; and made a concerted attempt to freshen something which had become stale.
The results of this internal makeover speak for themselves.
That Clemson defense — given its relative lack of a veteran identity — performed above and beyond the call in the first half of the season, when the offense was in search of itself. However, the Tigers looked a lot more ordinary (and young) on defense in the back end of the season. North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina, and even (to a lesser extent) Syracuse found openings in Clemson’s alignments. Former OU defensive coordinator Brent Venables silenced Bob Stoops a year ago in the Russell Athletic Bowl, but now, he must do so under a very different set of circumstances.
If judged on the last three performances of the regular season, Oklahoma’s offense would appear to have all the advantages against Clemson’s defense. However, the extended break between the end of the regular season and the arrival of a bowl game has often been the great leveler for hot offenses…
… as Oklahoma has found out each of the past three times it has played a championship-stage bowl game in Miami.
On one of those occasions, the Sooners triumphed due to that dynamic, as Florida State’s juggernaut dissolved into a puddle of incompetence. On the other two occasions, Oklahoma’s offense found no real answers for an inspired defense… and that old demon called bowl-game rust.
*
Oklahoma and college football history meet again in Miami. The Sooners can’t expect their defense to be as great as it was in the first week of 2001. They just want it to be reasonably effective.
Oklahoma’s true path to another happy Miami memory lies in the ability of its offense to write a decidedly different script on the final day of 2015.
