Uh, I think you should take away this: for the last few years, OU WASNT on a completely different level. We are backsliding into some pretty alarming territory
Agree. OU might be a bit better than in recent years, but they are still not the OU of the Bob Stoops/early Lincoln Riley years. Those teams would have won that game by an even wider margin Saturday, and put up 70+. This OU team is good. I agree with Brent and Chris that they are Top 20, maybe even Top 10. But this is not a team that will be competing for the CFP this year by any stretch. They are a 9, maybe 10-win team. Which is good but not great by OU standards historically.
I think Iowa State would have been able to compete better, but the bottom fell out pretty quickly. They took the first punch well, the pick 6. But then in the 2nd quarter, you had an OU TD drive, followed by an ISU 3 and out, followed by an ISU punt blocked for a safety, followed by an OU sustained drive ending in a FG, followed by an ISU INT, followed by OU scoring another TD on a short field against our seemingly always susceptible 2-minute defense. The game was decided in that 8-9 minute window of time in the 2nd quarter. Momentum shifts like that are pretty rare. We matched them pretty much blow for blow until that point, and only lost 10-0 in the 2nd half. I don't think the disparity is quite as bad as some people are making it out to be.