NORMAN — It is a frightful thing to fall into the hands of a dysfunctional football team.

Immediately the question becomes, “How can a team with such a strong defense and what appears to be a talented and experienced offense be so comically bad at times?”

With any good question, the first task is to go out and find information and evidence. In this sense, the best evidence is what the coaches and players share.

That great defense? They know what they must do.

"This group of guys is so driven," Jake Kreul said after the game. "We have great leadership. It’s just getting back to work on Monday and watching what we put on tape ... we didn’t play a perfect game at all."

"We didn’t play well enough to win, it’s pretty obvious," Taylor Wein said. "And we have to execute a lot better. Coach Venables put us in very successful calls and we all have a job to do and when one dude doesn’t do that, you get beat and you get exposed."

The defense has a high standard. It’s easy to tell. Following a game where they held a good Kentucky team's offense to 14 points, they’re talking about how they need to be better and that they simply didn't play perfectly.

Juxtapose that with the offense, and you have players and coaches, either saying the same things they have said over and over again, deferring to needing time to watch film when questioned or hoping against all logic and past evidence that they will become something that they simply aren’t: consistent.

"What could we have done better? What could I have done better? What could us as coaches have done better? What could the players have done better? We have to look at all of it, and ultimately we have to get rolling on Monday," Ben Arbuckle said.

"We'll look at it, but you’ve just got to score in the red zone," John Mateer said. We could move the ball, but we only put up 13 points. We got to finish those drives and score points in the end zone.

Now it’s important to remember that Oklahoma doesn’t have a choice in the matter. Arbuckle and Mateer have to be confident despite what their 18 games at OU together tell. There’s no reason to fault them for verbally banging their head against a brick wall.

But when you have a defensive captain talk about what they need to do — specifically the defense, not the team — in order to be better and an offense that fails to identify what it can and cannot do, it’s no wonder that the Sooners find themselves at .500 in mid-October.

The postgame stories this week should have been about Kreul and his sensational play as a true freshman. There should be columns about how Manny Choice has truly emerged as a pass-catching threat — a first for this offensive coaching staff for a preps-recruited talent at that position.

Instead, you have a team that knows its best chance for victory on any given Saturday is for the defense to always play near–perfect while the offense is expected to only uncharacteristically not make crucial mistakes.

Good teams do not thrive, nor exist that have differing standards for different sides of the ball.

Kentucky’s defense is statistically underwhelming. It is the weakness of their team compared to their offense. But at no point during their game with Oklahoma did their defense appear poorly coached or poorly managed. They are what they are and their coaching staff knows how to put them in the best positions to succeed.

OU is content with having a high standard for its defense while begging its offense to do the bare minimum. They may not prepare that way, but they sure play and coach that way on Saturdays.

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