Lincoln Riley hopes to have more of his roster available for Saturday's game

Oklahoma Sooners head coach says "it's just kind of a constant back and forth," but is optimistic that his team will be healthier than last week against Missouri State

Lincoln Riley has emphasized again and again that he's not going to share details about his team's COVID-19 testing data. 

However, in a Monday morning teleconference with media, he expressed cautious optimism that he'll have more healthy players for this weekend's game than he did on Sept. 12 against Missouri State. 

"We expect to do a better job with it," he remarked. "Hopefully, we can do that and have some more guys back."

The Sooners had no less than 20 players inactive against Missouri State, but still throttled the Bears 48-0 for the program's first shutout win since 2015. 

"I think the nature of these deals and all these tests is, so much is day-to-day," Riley continued. "It's just kind of a constant back and forth. For us, we just try to focus in on the guys that are here."

OU announced new COVID testing results on Monday at noon, and the results seem encouraging. 

From student-athletes in all sports and the entire athletics staff, OU administered 583 tests to student-athletes and 177 tests to staff between Sept. 13-Sept. 19, and 

Below is the latest COVID-19 data from tests performed on University of Oklahoma student-athletes (all sports) and athletics staff, and there were eight total positive test results.

In that time frame, there were 20 active cases among student-athletes and three among staff. In all, 143 student-athletes are classified as "recoveries," while the staff recorded seven. 

The university reports the positivity rate for student-athlete tests over the past three weeks has dropped from 9 percent to 4 percent to 1 percent.

Riley didn't appear to give any indication that this weekend's game with the Wildcats was in jeopardy. The Big 12 has stated that conference games are to be played as long as a team has 53 healthy players, with a minimum of seven offensive linemen, four interior defensive linemen and one quarterback.

"The way I've understood it is if we feel like we've got any potential issues for attempting to play the game, we'll communicate that," Riley said. 

It's worth noting that Kansas State head coach Chris Klieman has repeatedly noted his team's struggles with COVID-19 contact tracing. The Wildcats were missing a significant percentage of their roster in a season-opening loss to Arkansas State, and Klieman said on his Monday conference call that his program seems to take "two steps forward, a step-and-a-half or two steps back" with COVID-19 inactives.

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