What Brent Venables said after OU’s 30-23 loss to Missouri | Sport

Oklahoma (5-5, 1-5 SEC) lost to Missouri (7-2, 3-2 SEC) on Saturday night in Columbia, Missouri.

Here’s what head coach Brent Venables had to say after the Sooners’ loss:

About the performance in the fourth quarter:

“Heartbreaking loss. I feel so sorry for our players. They did everything we asked them to do, they fought their ass off to put us in a position to win the game tonight.”

“In the second half, I thought our guys just fought with everything they had and it wasn’t good enough. We’ve got to do a better job of helping them. (Missouri) converted too many third- downs against us on defense and we were outscored 21-7 turnovers and nothing affects the game like them. We have to do a better job of taking care of the football. I’m just incredibly thankful and proud of our guys , and I and the rest of the staff have to do a better job of helping them in some way.”

On Xavier Robinson’s performance:

“He’s great. He just built on what he showed last week … he ran through the bin, got good instincts, ran well behind his pads, broke a lot of tackles and really helped us move the ball down and score there late.”

On ball security issues at quarterback:

“He’s got to get better. It’s unfortunate, you never like it, it affects everything you do. You’ve got to get better at taking care of the ball. It’s just the basics, it’s nothing earth-shattering. We’ve got to get better to that.”

On special teams improvement from last year:

“From the special teams efficiency a year ago, we had four fumbles and missed more kicks. It affects everything you do, so you know you’re not going to be very good. We just got better. Luke Elzinga has been great. Zach Schmidt and Tyler Keltner was really good. And then we got more players who are in their second and third years playing in those units… The players have really matured into the mindset of gaining the hidden yardage and being aggressive with what we want on special teams.”

On the last drive:

“We really thought we could take the ball down the field and have a chance… Our two minutes all year in particular have been really good. You don’t see them all, but we go one-on-one in practice and really felt that we had a good plan for it. we were able to get a couple of completions there, with the timeouts we had in the back pocket. and we really felt like Zach could kick it about 62, 63 yards time we had on right, that’s what we wanted to do.”