Some Doubting If This Oklahoma Football Team Is Worthy of Top-5 Ranking
By Chip Rouse
The past is prologue to the future…or in the case of the 2016 edition of Oklahoma football, the present.
This is how some college football experts are reacting to the Associated Press preseason ranking of the Sooners as the No. 3 team in the country to start the 2016 season. Sad to say, but Oklahoma only has itself to blame for why a number of authoritative figures who religiously follow the college game feel the Sooners won’t live up to those high expectations.
Phil Steele, a renowned college football expert and publisher of the eponymous college football preview publication that bears his name, adroitly pointed out in his 2016 edition that the last four times Bob Stoops’ Oklahoma teams have been ranked in the top five in the preseason poll the Sooners failed to finish a season higher than 14th in the final Associated Press Top 25.
I have read and heard that comment on numerous occasions over the past couple of weeks, or since the initial Amway Coaches Poll was released, and it came up again in spades on a college football preview show aired on ESPN on Sunday evening.
David Pollack and Joey Galloway, both former college and NFL players and now ESPN college analysts, seemingly couldn’t wait to verbally cast that rain cloud on the Sooners’ 2016 championship chances.
Neither doubted that Oklahoma was the solid choice to win the Big 12 for a 10th time under head coach Stoops, but they were adamant that history would repeat itself insofar as the Sooners being able to live up to the lofty expectations everyone seems to have of OU coming into the 2016 season.
Every time Oklahoma starts the season ranked this high in the polls, they have “disappointed,” was Galloway’s assessment of the Sooners’ top-three ranking to start the 2016 season.
Both of the major national polls (the coaches poll as well as the AP voters, made up of writers and broadcasters) ranked the Sooners as the third best team in the country in their preseason top-25 polls.
The inference being made by Galloway, Pollack and others is that Oklahoma, in recent years, has done better when it is not so high up on the national radar screen to start a season.
Since Stoops has been at Oklahoma, which is now in its 18th year, the Sooners have been ranked outside of the top-10 just three times to begin a new season. On each occasion, including the school’s national championship season in 2000, Oklahoma ended the season ranked No. 6 or higher.
Granted, the facts are the facts, and the Sooners have, indeed, disappointed pollsters and fans before, especially Oklahoma fans. History doesn’t always repeat itself, though. And there is nothing to say it will this season.
This whole notion of Oklahoma not being able to handle the pressure of a high ranking appears to me more a conspiracy theory around Bob Stoops and how the media believes the Sooners have largely underachieved over the last six or seven seasons despite being ranked in the top 10 to begin the year.
This is not 2009 or 2014, two seasons when Oklahoma was ranked in the top five at the beginning of the season, only to stumble to just eight wins both times.
Although the Sooners might have a short history of letting the pressure of a target on their back get to them, they also have a history of fulfilling expectations when they are ranked high to start a season.
In five of Oklahoma’s national championship seasons (1954-55 under Bud Wilkinson and 1974-75 and 1985 under Barry Switzer), the Sooners started high and ended high. In all four season, they began the season ranked no lower than No. 3 in the AP poll. We all know how those seasons ended.
The 2016 edition of the Sooners is an entirely different team with different personnel and different leadership and, frankly, a different attitude and mindset.
This is not to say that this year’s Oklahoma team won’t both astound us at times with its on-field execution and leave us teetering on the edge of our seats with concern at other times.
ESPN’s Football Power Index gives this season’s Oklahoma team a 64.4 percent chance of winning the Big 12 and a 17.3 percent probability of going undefeated, which incidentally is the highest of any Power Five conference team.
The Sooners may not run the table in 2016. After all, they have one of the more difficult schedules in the country, with three teams ranked in the top 25 in their first four games.
Going undefeated in college football is a very difficult thing to do, especially now that teams from Power Five leagues are being required to play at least one nonconference Power Five opponent.
Barring injuries or something totally unforeseen, Oklahoma is clearly capable and good enough this season to win 11 games, which they have done 11 times under Stoops.
Contrary to what the naysayers want to believe, perhaps all this cloud of doubt hanging over the No. 3-ranked 2016 Sooner football team will serve as added motivation to show up the growing list of critics and prove them wrong.
This is the side of the story that I’m going with.