The Oklahoma Sooners will not make the College Football Playoff this season.
A team with 3 losses has never done it, and while it remains at 12 teams, probably shouldn't. After dropping to 3-3 with another gut-wrenching loss to Kentucky at home last Saturday, OU effectively ended it's chances only halfway through the season, which is remarkable considering the hype they had coming into this year.
Every so often, all the stars seem to align, and even the hard-to-impress local beat writers start to get on board and say the Sooners might have a chance. This was one of those years. They had returning experience at nearly every key position, filled their gaps in the portal, and showed improvement with their playoff berth a last season. And yet, here they stand: 3-3, the worst offense in the conference (nearly the worst in the FBS period), and completely rudderless moving forward. There is no momentum, little reassurance from the coaching staff that things are going to change, and outside of the Texas win, little reason to consider this anything but a massive failure.
It is just not acceptable at the University of Oklahoma to be effectively irrelevant midway through October, in any year, but especially in a season with such potential and momentum coming in. So the question becomes, then, what happens now?
First and foremost, it's extremely unlikely there are any significant changes made for the time being. Ben Arbuckle is currently still the Offensive Coordinator. Position coaches have stayed pat. Brent Venables just signed an extension, and has a $50,000,000+ buyout. Even quarterback John Mateer has continued to get the vocal support of his coaches, and appears unlikely to be pulled barring exceptional circumstances. And, honestly, who even knows which of those things, if any, would actually change anything? By all accounts, it feels like blame is too shared by all involved to be corrected by any one thing, and you can't change all of those things all at once midseason and expect some kind of positive result to come out of it. To hold any single one of those parties individually accountable at this point would only be making them a scapegoat for the others that are just as culpable. The issues are too prevalent and too complex to be fixed that simply–a fact that is as true as it is unhelpful for Sooners fans feeling frustrated.
So what to do, then, for OU fans faced with a bleak rest of the season? Give up, boycott, flip the channel to Thunder games and pretend it was all a bad dream?
Hardly.
Fans have every right to be frustrated. Unfortunately, as with most things in life, there just isn't anything that can undo what's already done. You can't "un-lose" 3 games you've already lost. So, instead, the fans will have to do what college football fans everywhere have done for over a hundred years: show up and have a great time, purely for the love of the game.
There are only so many games in a lifetime. One day, without knowing it, every fan will attend their last one. It's part of what makes the sport so special: the short seasons mean that there is ultimately a finite number of opportunities to enjoy it. It would, therefore, be even more tragic to allow a disappointing first half of a season to prevent fans from enjoying the sport they love for the remainder than the losses themselves were in the first place.
Obviously everyone wants to watch their team win. Obviously the expectation at a place like Oklahoma is to compete for championships, and to not do so is unacceptable. But the tailgates, the food, the drink, the roadtrips, the lifelong memories made with friends and family? The smells, the sights, the sounds, the pregame, in-game, and postgame traditions? Those things never change. Fans love college football because college football is the best sport in the world. For the Sooners, and a hundred other fan bases, that's all they have left this season. Fortunately, that's enough.
Accountability will have it's day in the sun come season's end, and there will be plenty of blame and angst to go around. But for now, the season doesn't stop just because your team lost a few games–enjoying it for what it is shouldn't, either.