By Skeeter Smith
Oklahoma has had a brutal welcome to the SEC in its inaugural season thus far. From losing at home to a coach your program ran out of town to getting obliterated by your team’s biggest rival, it felt like life couldn’t get worse for the Sooner program.
That was until Shane Beamer (another former OU assistant coach) and South Carolina came to town. Less than five minutes into the game, the Gamecocks were up 21-0 over the Sooners. The game was over before fans were even fully in their seats. Oklahoma would go on to lose this game 35-9, suffering their worst home loss in a decade.
That loss puts OU at 1-3 in conference play, with that lone win coming against an Auburn team that more or less gave the game away rather than the Sooners winning it. The issue? The offense has been dreadful. How bad? Oklahoma currently ranks 128th out of 133 teams in total offense. To be fair, injuries to receivers and the offensive line have plagued this roster. That is still no excuse, though, for a program like OU to perform worse on the offensive side of the ball than Akron and New Mexico State.
After the loss to South Carolina, head coach Brent Venables has gone into full-blown panic mode to try and patch together a respectable season. The first domino to fall was the firing of offensive coordinator Seth Littrell, a move that probably should’ve been made. Secondly, it has recently been announced that the Sooners will revert to quarterback Jackson Arnold after he was benched in the Tennessee game for Michael Hawkins Jr. earlier this year -a move that to me was a bit puzzling.
Removing him from the Tennessee game made sense; he was playing poorly and deserved to be benched. However, losing his job completely felt like a knee-jerk reaction this early in his career. You have a quarterback in only his fifth start ever, making his first conference appearance, behind a patchwork offensive line, throwing the ball to his fifth- and sixth-string receivers, all while getting play calls from a struggling OC. Not exactly a recipe for success for any quarterback, much less a freshman. Then to replace him with a true freshman – expecting that to fix all your problems – was just not the right answer.
This benching makes even less sense when you consider that this was the same quarterback the Sooners were confident enough in that they didn’t prioritize bringing back Dillon Gabriel for this season. Growing pains were bound to happen with Arnold, and perhaps some of those have been more painful than expected. However, giving up on him this early in the season, given the circumstances, was not the solution.
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So, what happens next? I don’t know, but Venables is running out of coordinators to fire and quarterbacks to change before all eyes are completely on him. He was already responsible for the Sooners’ first losing season since 1998 two years ago, and now he’s on the verge of having them miss their first bowl game since that same season.
To avoid that travesty, he will need to find answers on the offensive side of the ball quickly, as the rest of the schedule offers no room to breathe – four of the last five opponents being ranked within the Top 25.
