One major change the Oklahoma Sooners could make to sustain defensive dominance throughout SEC schedule

The turnaround of the Oklahoma Sooners' defense in 2024 has been one of the most impressive feats of the season. I believe this would be discussed more often if the offense had any sort of life and could score points in SEC competition, given how much the Sooners' defense has been the butt of many jokes over the last decade.

Oklahoma's defense is 11th in Stop Rate, 12th in EPA/Play, 9th in EPA/Rush allowed, and 11th in HAVOC rate (i.e. disruption rate) so far this season despite playing some talented offenses in Tulane, Tennessee, Auburn, and Texas. The defense has kept the Sooners in games and even won them the game against both Houston and Auburn.

Despite this success, there is one frustrating tendency the Sooners keep turning to that they should stop moving forward if they want to sustain their defensive performance against talented offenses like Ole Miss, Alabama, and LSU in the rest of their schedule.

Against the Texas Longhorns, I kept noticing the Sooners shifting defensive personnel throughout the game. They didn't just get 29(why?!) different players involved on defense, they kept shifting their alignments up front. Frequently, Oklahoma shifted from three-down defensive linemen to four and vice-versa.

Now this isn't unusual . Plenty of teams do this, albeit not quite at the rate the Sooners were doing it. Teams mix up their personnel and alignments all the time to keep offenses guessing and run different looks to play to the strength of guys on the field.

In fact, just a couple of weeks after the Sooners' loss to Tennessee where they used the 3-3-5 throughout, Arkansas deployed the same 3-3-5 to combat the Volunteers' offense despite never running it prior, which helped them pull off their upset 19-14 win.

The issue for the Sooners is that this three-down look repeatedly got out-gapped and gashed in the run game.

After noticing it, I had to start going through the rest of Oklahoma's film to get to the bottom of this trend. The results were pretty interesting.

Here is the difference in production on those snaps from Weeks 1-7 (note: Oklahoma did not play a snap of three-down before their game against Tennessee)

Oklahoma defensive production based on alignment

Yes, the total volume stats are going to be different simply based on the difference in snap counts, but even adjusting for rate, the Sooners are vastly better out of their four-down than their three.

They are producing more pressure despite blitzing less and generating more stops.

After seeing the difference in stats, I had to dive into the analytics of this and the results were interesting, to say the least.

In Oklahoma's three-down looks, they are giving up a -.148 EPA/Play. Doesn't sound too bad, right? The problem is that number is heavily buoyed by their game against Tennessee and the four snaps they played in Auburn, where the Sooners allowed a -.156 EPA/Play and -1.474 EPA/Play, respectively. Against Texas? .001, a huge swing in the other direction.

Out of their three-down looks, the Sooners are allowing a positive EPA on 30% of their plays on the season, with a 29.2% against Tennessee and a 34.2% against the Longhorns.

When Oklahoma shifts into four , their EPA/Play allowed drops to a -.156. They allow a positive EPA on 36.8% of their total snaps out of four-down, heavily influenced by their game against Auburn with a 44.3% rate (Oklahoma's defense got smashed in the first half before settling down in the second half).

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When I filtered out the results in the run game vs pass game, these numbers got even more surprising.

On the season, Oklahoma is allowing a -.175 EPA/Run out of their four-down, compared to a -.133 in their three-down. They've allowed a positive EPA run on 33.3% of their three-down sets, compared to 31.4% in their four.

In the passing game, Oklahoma is allowing a -.140 EPA/Play and a positive EPA play on 41.6% rate out of their four-down, heavily weighed by a 47.5% rate against Auburn. When they flip to their three-down, that number goes to a -.164 EPA/Play and they are only allowing a positive EPA play on 26.7% of snaps.

Interestingly enough, Oklahoma allowed a positive EPA play on 34.6% of their snaps against Texas, their second-lowest allowed of the season. Only Temple had a lower rate than the Longhorns did against the Sooners here.

Here are their production and EPA totals in each alignment just against Texas last weekend.

Oklahoma defense vs Texas

Part of the pass-rushing stats come with an increased blitz rate out of their three-down rate, but seeing it laid out like this was simply jarring.

Now, these numbers aren't perfect, and as always require context. As stated above, the Sooners blitz more out of three-down than four, which will influence some stats like stops, pressures, and tackles for loss. The Sooners also played more snaps out of three than four against the Longhorns. Oklahoma's defense also wore out as the game went on, dropping some stats.

So what change would I make here? Despite some interesting results against Texas, I would call even fewer of the three-down looks moving forward. Nothing is more telling than their positive rushing EPA rate of 40%. Oklahoma would run entire drives out of three-down, and Texas's offense would just gash them outside on the perimeter.

Moving forward, I'd like to see them stick with running even more four-down, especially on early downs, and dial back the three-down looks into a passing down-only changeup.

Not only do I believe the four-down is better suited for the players on Oklahoma's roster, I also believe that their ability to generate pressure significantly better out of their four-down will be the difference throughout the rest of their SEC schedule.