Oklahoma (5-5, 1-5 SEC) lost to Missouri (7-2, 3-2 SEC) on Saturday night in Columbia, Missouri.
Here’s what head coach Brent Venables said after the Sooners’ loss:
On the execution in the fourth quarter:
“Heartbreaking loss. I feel so bad for our players. They have done everything that we’ve asked them to do, they fought their butts off to put us in a position to win the game here tonight.”
“In the second half, I thought our guys just fought with everything they had and it wasn’t good enough. We’ve got to do a better job to help them. (Missouri) converted way too many third downs against us on defense, and obviously we got outscored 21-7 turnovers and nothing impacts the game like those. We’ve got to do a better job taking care of the football. I’m just incredibly thankful and proud of our guys, and me and the rest of the staff have to do a better job of helping them, somehow, some way.”
On Xavier Robinson’s performance:
“He’s fantastic. Just building off of what he showed last week as well…he was running through trash, got good instincts, ran well behind his pads, broke a lot of tackles, and really helped us move the ball down and score there late.”
On ball security issues at quarterback:
“He’s got to get better. It’s unfortunate, you never like it, it affects everything that you do. You gotta get better at taking care of the ball. It’s just the basics, it’s not anything earth-shattering. We got to get better at it.”
On special teams improvement from last year:
“From the special teams efficiency a year ago, we had four fumbles and missed several kicks. That affects everything you do so you know, you’re not gonna be very good. We just got better. Luke Elzinga’s been fantastic. Zach Schmidt and Tyler Keltner were really good. And then we got several players that are in their second and third year playing in those units…The players have really matured into the mindset of winning the hidden yardage and being aggressive with what we want on special teams.”
On the final drive:
“We really thought that we could take the ball down the field and have a chance…Our two minute all year has been really good in particular. You don’t see all of them, but we run ones against ones in practice and really felt like we had a good plan for that. We could get a couple completions there, with the timeouts we had in our back pocket, we could get the ball past midfield. And we really felt like Zach could kick it around 62, 63 yards. With the time we had on the clock, that’s what we wanted to do.”
