Oklahoma Intent on Playing a Complete Four Quarters

Lincoln Riley said the team must take pride in playing up to OU's standard of football for the entire 60 minutes on Saturday.

No matter the opponent, the Oklahoma Sooners have to play four quarters of football.

That was Lincoln Riley’s message to the team after No. 4-ranked OU’s underwhelming 40-35 victory in the season opener with Tulane this week.

During his weekly press conference on Tuesday, Riley said he thought the team was worried too much about other things, and not on staying locked in until the final whistle against Tulane.

“We were too circumstantial (on Saturday),” Riley said. “That was our problem. We were worried about the scoreboard, all the other circumstances as opposed to our brand of ball, our standard of ball regardless of any of those outside factors.

“If we’ve got any chance of being a good football team, we’ve got to figure out how to play four quarters and our mentality not being affected by the scoreboard, our opponent, anything else. That is the sole focus of our program right now.”

Senior defensive leader Isaiah Thomas said he could actually feel a lull sweeping across some of the team coming out of halftime on Saturday, and that he’s determined to set that trend straight.

“You could feel that vibe coming into halftime and going out on the field,” Thomas said during a Zoom press conference on Wednesday. “We’re used to the stadium being packed out 90,000 every single home game. We knew with the schedule shift that the crowd wasn’t gonna be packed and stuff, so we knew what to expect. But not everybody knew what to expect because not everybody’s played in that stadium before.

“So yeah that’s just something we’ve got to harp on and emphasize and show them how important it is because the little details could end up being a big thing and stuff like that. I take ownership in that as well with trying to lead them and show them the way as well.”

Playing a complete football game was a battle the Sooners fought in 2020 as well. While OU looked like world beaters for quarters at a time, the team would hit lulls for stretches of any given game, causing more than one contest to be closer than it probably should have been last year.

Tight end Austin Stogner said that the work to get back to playing four quarters of high level football starts on Mondays and Tuesdays and builds into game day throughout the week.

“It starts in practice,” he said. “We need to finish well in practice and make sure we're finishing on all the plays. If you do it in practice, if you play hard all the plays — Coach (Joe Jon) Finley always preaches to us — if you run, do the extra stuff, then you won't get tired.

“You won't play football and get tired again. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to do the extra stuff and make extra runs. That's big and that will just lead to us staying locked in throughout the game and playing all four quarters.”

The atmosphere should be much better this Saturday as the Sooners welcome in the Western Carolina Catamounts. The stadium is officially sold out, as many fans will make their return to Gaylord Family - Oklahoma Memorial Stadium for the first time since 2019.

But regardless of what’s going on inside the stadium, Thomas said the team has to focus solely on what they can do to play their best brand of football.

“In-between those white lines, we can only control what we can control,” Thomas said. “When it comes to adversity, we’re going to face it. We just got to handle it.

“But when it comes to energy, I think that’s one thing that we can definitely control on how we create energy for ourselves despite what the crowd may feel or what’s going on on that field. So that’s one thing that we can definitely control.”

Plenty of Sooners should see the field again this Saturday if thing go according to plan, but regardless of who is playing and when they get into the game, Riley said everyone on the team will have one core objective against Western Carolina.

“I think our focus right now is whether we’re playing— it doesn’t matter, an NFL team, a high school team, a I-AA, Division I,” Riley said. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to play four quarters as a team. That’s job number one, two and three right now.”

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