No. 6 Baylor and No. 12 Oklahoma weren’t quite the participants in last week’s LSU-Alabama showdown, but the stakes were nearly as high in Waco on Saturday night. And it was Oklahoma that won the pot, a 44-34 victory that should make the Sooners the Big 12’s favorite and worst nightmare.
Oklahoma vs. Baylor final score, and 3 things we learned from the Sooners’ 44-34 win
Baker Mayfield leads the Sooners to a win in hostile Waco.
Baker Mayfield threw for 270 yards and three touchdowns, and added another 76 yards and a touchdown on the ground, gritting out a game that saw his knee turn red with blood as he took plenty of punishment from the Bears. And Samaje Perine thumped his way to 166 yards and two more touchdowns, balancing a Sooners offense that Baylor never stopped on three consecutive drives.
Oklahoma's defense did a fine job of bottling up the Bears, who entered Saturday night leading the nation in both scoring and total offense, but the dropoff from Seth Russell to Jarrett Stidham was obvious on this night. Stidham made only a handful of mistakes, but one of them was a critical interception in the fourth quarter, and any mistakes at all might be more than the relatively few Russell generally made.
The victory probably means that Baylor can't control its own College Football Playoff destiny, as only an unbeaten Big 12 champion would seem like a lock. For Oklahoma, though, it's just a first step toward a conference championship.
1. Mayfield the magician. Expect a whole lot of Heisman hype for Mayfield after what was a spectacular performance on Saturday night. He, not Stidham, looked like the trigger man of an unstoppable offense, and he did much more on the ground than most QBs in pass-happy offenses can.
And Mayfield's signature play, on which he hung in the pocket for an eon and eventually evaded rushers to throw a dagger touchdown pass, recalled Texas A&M Heisman winner Johnny Manziel doing something similar at Alabama. Don't underrate the power of a single play to sway Heisman voters.
2. Baylor can be stopped. This wasn’t the pyrotechnic team that we’ve seen in recent years, and a lot of the credit for that has to go to Oklahoma. The Sooners allowed 159 yards on the ground, but on 44 carries, and kept the Bears out of favorable down-and-distance situations as a result.
And Stidham just wasn’t able to pierce what was the nation’s No. 8 pass efficiency defense with any consistency. While his late pick was by far his worst play, he threw another and was also forced to dink-and-dunk to move Baylor, which is far from the blueprint Art Briles draws up each week.
With Russell, the Bears scored 61.1 points per game this season. (Baylor didn’t score fewer than 56 points in a game Russell finished this season.) With Stidham, Baylor’s scored 32.5 per game.
3. The Big 12 should come down to Bedlam. The Big 12’s back-loaded November schedule set up a series of big-time matchups, but Oklahoma’s schedule may be the hardest. After this game at Baylor, they go home to host TCU, then travel to Stillwater for their rivalry matchup with Oklahoma State.
But if Oklahoma could do this to Baylor, and TCU is so out of rhythm that it can struggle with Kansas, it stands to reason that the Sooners should take care of business against the Horned Frogs in Norman.
That might not be great for the Big 12, which would feel much more comfortable about its chances of producing a College Football Playoff team with an undefeated Oklahoma State (which didn’t impress at Iowa State on Saturday), and would see that team in a winner-take-all matchup with red-hot Oklahoma if the Sooners win next week. But it will be awesome for fans, who could see a top-10 clash, and maybe a fourth straight Bedlam game decided by single digits.
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