“It’s a college game and you can’t —I’m not gotta sit here and call out (players). The bottom line, you talk about it, you show ‘em why, … we showed ‘em a hundred times,” Stoops said, adding that the coaches showed 10 minutes of the 2013 loss against Texas to the team. “They’ve got to choose to be ready to play. I can’t figure out why that would be, that a 20-year-old, a 21-year-old, when you’re only getting to play so many times and you have a rivalry game, they’re not …
“That may be their excuse. The bottom line is we got out-executed. So I didn’t feel that (OU was flat). I felt we had a good week of practice. I felt like we came into the game knowing we needed to play well. Then you get in the game and you’re not, you know, they out-execute you, get charged up and then it appears that way that they’re excited and we’re not. But I guarantee you, had we scored a touchdown, kicked off to them, recovered their fumble and scored a little bit later, we’d have been the ones charged up. So I think that’s young people. Again, I don’t buy that they weren’t ready to play. You can put it all on me, but I don’t play.”
MORE: Watch Bob Stoops' weekly press conference
So how does the coaching staff motivate the team in the future?
“We’ll see. I find that odd that kids this age – as I said earlier – aren’t motivated to play in a game like this. I don’t buy it. I don’t feel that that’s the case,” Stoops said. “Like I said, I thought we were ready to play. They made some plays early to spark them and we were playing in a hole trying to come back from it. (Tulsa World)
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