Oklahoma’s defense spent the first two games of the season fighting a familiar problem: missed tackles piling up too fast.
Against UTEP and then Michigan, the Sooners combined for 36 missed tackles by Pro Football Focus. That was a jarring number compared with last season’s standard, when Oklahoma had more than 13 missed tackles in a game only twice during its run to the College Football Playoff and never went above 18.
The opener against the Miners included 15 missed tackles, with two coming from Taylor Wein, who is usually dependable in that area. The next week at Michigan, the count jumped to 21. Owen Heinecke, who missed just 16 tackles all of last season and never had more than two in a game, was charged with seven of them against the Wolverines.
Since then, though, the Sooners have cleaned things up.
Over the last two games, Oklahoma has missed just 13 tackles. That total is better than all but one two-game stretch from last season. In last November’s wins over Tennessee and Alabama - the stretch that helped push Oklahoma into the CFP - the Sooners combined for 11 missed tackles.
The most recent showing was the best of all. Even in a 41-13 loss to Georgia, Oklahoma missed only four tackles, its lowest total over the last two seasons.
That kind of progress matters because it’s the sort of fix that can travel. The offense has struggled badly, but the defense has made clear gains in one of the areas that was hurting it early. The other issue, turnovers, at least showed some movement against Georgia, when the Sooners came away with two takeaways.
After the rough start, Oklahoma’s defenders said they expected the tackling to come around quickly.
“I don’t think it’s really been a huge struggle, but I think we have a lot of young guys playing and new guys playing,” safety Peyton Bowen said after the Michigan loss. “They just want to make plays right now, and there’s nothing wrong with it - until there is something wrong with it. … So we just have to keep our leverage … and that will ultimately lead us to better positioning on tackling.”
Kip Lewis has been one of Oklahoma’s most reliable tacklers over the last two seasons, and he has missed just two this year, though he did sit out the win over New Mexico because of injury.
“Tackling is all just about attitude,” Lewis said of the tackling improvements over the last two games. “So kind of just changing our attitudes, saying that we’re not gonna miss anymore. So I think that was just kind of the key part.”
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