An otherwise successful 2019 season went sour quickly as No. 4 Oklahoma was overcome by No. 1 LSU, 63-28, in Atlanta in a College Football Playoff semifinal.

The Sooners have won five Big 12 Championships in a row but this is the fourth time (in those same five years) that Oklahoma has advanced to the four-team playoff and lost in the first round.

Meanwhile, No. 3 Clemson beat No. 2 Ohio State 29-23 in the other semifinal. Clemson advances to play LSU in the title game on January 13 in New Orleans.

“Give Oklahoma credit,” LSU coach Ed Edgeron said. “They have great athletes. Coach Riley is great coach, and they’ve had a lot of success.”

Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Joe Burrow of LSU picked apart the OU defense, which was missing two key players. Starting safety Delarrin Turner-Yell was out with a broken collarbone and defensive end Ronnie Perkins – OU’s best pass rusher – was suspended for the game. And to make matters worse, early in the second quarter, defensive back Brendan Radley-Hiles was ejected for a targeting a receiver who was not even receiving a pass.

Defensive backs Justin Broiles and Woodi Washington filled it but there was a noticeable dropoff.

“Broiles is our primary replacement for Turner-Yell getting hurt and so Broiles, we had to crash-course him at safety over the last week to get him ready,” said OU coach Lincoln Riley. “All of a sudden now he’s got to play nickel.

“So those guys are going to continue to be good players, yeah. You’d love to have gone in with the other ones. That wasn’t the hand we were dealt. They’ve got some good players. Was that a factor in the game? Yes. Was it a deciding factor? No.  Some of our mistakes and inability to play our very best was the deciding factor.”

Oklahoma just didn’t play up to their capabilities.

“What can you say?” said OU coach Lincoln Riley. “I thought the game, we traded blows early. They went on the run there at the end of the first half. We got a little frantic and just didn’t play our best.”

Mistakes and playing backups took its toll.

“We made some uncharacteristic mistakes in the second quarter, end of the first quarter, second quarter, that we haven’t made, some, all year,” Riley said. “And you can’t give a team like that any help.

“Then, certainly, not having a few of the guys – certainly Bookie getting ejected on the targeting was a huge, huge play in the game. And we just lost our composure there a little bit, lot our sense of focus, and it hurt us. LSU capitalized on it.”

And some of OU’s players played despite injuries in the game.

“… shoot in an era where a lot of guys don’t even want to play in their own bowl game, I’ve got two guys (Jalen Hurts and Neville Gallimore) next to me right here that will play in the NFL next year and will be high draft picks that were both injured, both had things going on, both could have easily came out of the game and both begging to stay in the game, even in the last couple minutes,” Riley said. “That’s the culture we’ve built and guys like these two are very much responsible for that.

“…It hurts right now, but it won’t diminish all they’ve been able to accomplish. Just I love this team. That’s it.”

Just like in the semifinal loss to Alabama last year, OU got behind early and couldn’t recover.

“This one’s different,” Riley argued. “Bama last year jumped up, it was 28-0 before you could even blink. We weren’t really playing good on any of the sides. I thought we kind of steadied after we hit the big play to CeeDee and then Kennedy scored the first touchdown. I thought we were going to steady there. We traded blows early. It was just that run there.

“What it is, I mean, you play really good teams in this playoff. And when you don’t play your best ball, good teams are going to take advantage of it. And LSU took advantage of us not playing our best ball there.

“And then there were just some pivotal big third — like there’s going to be in these games, but some pivotal third downs they made, a couple of unbelievable plays, a couple that we made a couple boneheaded plays. Several opportunities offensively that were just that far away, but in games like this, that’s the margin of error.”

LSU is really good and OU played really poorly.

“They got great players, really athletic players,” said OU’s Jalen Hurts. “They’re fast, they play strong. They rally to the ball. But when you play this game, you talk about the controllables, what you can control. We didn’t take advantage of our opportunities, and that’s something that we can control. They play really good defense, but we were too inconsistent to come out on top of this game, and I think that’s the blunt reality of it.”

Hurts felt like he let the team down.

“It hurts me in my heart, you know,” Hurts said. “When I decided to come to this school, I told Coach Riley, I’m going to go win you a National Championship, and I failed to do that.  Moving forward, I definitely hope — I’ve already told them, I hope that you guys learn from this. I hope everybody learns from this. It hurts me the most because usually, when you come up short in something, you can come back and you can fix it. I can’t come back and fix it. I’ll never play college football again.”

Hurts graduates will go to the NFL..

Riley doesn’t see this lopsided loss as a major setback for the program.

“We’re continuing to make strides,” Riley said. “There’s no doubt about it. I mean, just putting yourself here four times in five years is — I mean, that’s so hard to do, man. I mean, it’s so hard to do.

“So I think we’ve made some great improvements with the program. I’m excited about where we’re heading defensively. I think we’ve just scratched the surface about how good we can get on that side.  This program has championship DNA. We kind of find a way, and we’ll be back.”

OU All-American wide receiver CeeDee Lamb and linebacker Kenneth Murray have announced that they will forego their senior years and enter the NFL Draft.