Oklahoma Football: Are High 2016 Expectations a Blessing or Curse?
By Chip Rouse
If you’re a regular follower of this site, you’ve probably seen me write this before, but it is such a good analogy it bears repeating: Oklahoma football is to Big 12 supremacy as Kansas basketball is to league superiority on the hardwood.
Before Jayhawk fans – if in fact there are any who regularly visit this site – get all ruffled in the shorts, let me get a little more specific. Kansas has won a Big 12-record 12 consecutive regular-season conference championships and 16 in the 20-year history of the conference.
That leaves the Jayhawks just one shy of the all-time record for consecutive conference championships set by perhaps the greatest college coach ever, John Wooden, and his incomparable UCLA Bruins from 1967-79. And there is a very high chance Kansas will equal that record in the 2016-17 season.
But circling back to the main emphasis of this article, Oklahoma’s championship run in the Big 12 under head coach Bob Stoops, although not accomplished in consecutive seasons is almost as remarkable.
The Sooners have won 10 Big 12 championships in football, their latest coming last season. How does that even come close to comparing with what Kansas has done in basketball, you might ask? Simply put, there are fewer conference games played in football than in basketball. Because of that, a single league loss in football, and at most two, can easily end a championship run. The same simply isn’t true in college basketball, where one or two conference losses is more the norm for the teams that finish at the top of the league.
When the Big 12 preseason media poll comes out in late July or early August, Oklahoma should be right at the top, as it has been in four of the previous five years and in most of the seasons since 2000, when Stoops took the Sooners to their seventh national championship in just his second season in Norman.
If you discount OU’s uncharacteristic 8-5 overall record (5-4 in the Big 12) in 2014, the season following the Sooners’ impressive upset win in the BCS Sugar Bowl over two-time defending national champion Alabama, Oklahoma has one of the best winning percentages in college football over the past five seasons and, according to ESPN.com’s Power Index numbers, is third best in the nation in overall efficiency, trailing only Alabama and Clemson.
The Sooners are nearly everybody’s choice as the best team in the Big 12 coming into the 2016 season, and there should be little debate that they are at least in the top five nationally.
It is not just the enduring Oklahoma brand in college football that has earned the Sooners the high expectations they are recipient of in the countdown to the 2016 opening kickoff. With quarterback Baker Mayfield, himself a likely Heisman Trophy candidate to start the season, at the controls of what is expected to be one of the nation’s top five offenses in 2016 and with six returning starters on a defense that could also be in the top five in the country this coming season, it is hard not to imagine Oklahoma being one of the contenders again in 2016 for a spot in the College Football Playoff.
More from Stormin in Norman
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- Oklahoma football: ESPN, USA Today bowl projections after Week 3
- Oklahoma football: Sooner ‘D’ grading well, but real test begins with Big 12 play
- Two Oklahoma football players receive Big 12 weekly honors
- Oklahoma football: Sooners’ stock rising fast in ESPN prospective rankings
A precautionary note to Sooner fans: Let’s not allow ourselves to get our heads too far in the clouds, though, as far as the winds behind what is expected to be another thrilling season of Big 12 football get ready to sweep down the central Oklahoma plains. High preseason expectations – something that Sooner fans and their football team are highly accustomed to – do not always translate into season success.
As mentioned earlier, Oklahoma has been projected as the preseason Big 12 favorite in football in four of the past five seasons, but only twice in those five years have the Sooners actually finished atop the league standings, and in one of those years they tied for the conference crown (with Kansas State in 2012).
In 2011, the same season Oklahoma was the preseason No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25, the Sooners finished in a tie for third place in the Big 12. And in 2014, the Big 12’s preseason No. 1 Sooners finished a disappointing fourth in the conference and outside of the top 25.
Lots to be excited about, for sure. But we also must realize that a lot of things must go right many more times than not, with some good bounces and good luck mixed in, for a preseason favorite to end up the same way it started.
The one thing we know about Big 12 football is: The only thing that is guaranteed is that nothing is guaranteed and that no team or player is beyond vulnerability.
Get ready to buckle yourself in for another unpredictable, nail-biting season of Big 12 football.