Oklahoma football: What is the Sooners over/under win total for 2018?
By Chip Rouse
The games are still almost three months away, but preview publications are already projecting win totals for 2018. How does Oklahoma football fare in that projection for the coming season?
The Sooners finished 12-2 last season, Lincoln Riley’s first at the helm of the mighty Oklahoma football machine. Many of the early-season handicappers and so-called experts had projected as many as 11 wins by the Sooners a year ago. They did one better than that and advanced to the College Football Playoff for the second time in the four seasons of the new CFP format.
The Sooners enter the 2018 season without the services of Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Baker Mayfield, but don’t expect the Oklahoma offensive firepower to drop off that significantly.
Even without one of the best players in college football at the QB spot, the Sooners are still going to be very explosive on offense and will put plenty of points on the scoreboard.
Without a road trip to take on a top-five team this season, OU’s nonconference schedule is not as daunting as last season, but the Sooners will host UCLA and good Florida Atlantic team coached by the well-traveled Lane Kiffin in the coming season, as well Army, which runs a triple-option offense that Oklahoma made famous back in the 1970s and ’80s.
And, of course, the Big 12 is never a walk in the park with all of the high-powered spread offenses in the league and perhaps all but one of the 10 teams in the conference capable of winning any given week.
The Sooners will play seven games at home in 2018. They will be on the road for four true road games (all against Big 12 opponents), plus the annual Red River Showdown with archrival Texas in the Cotton Bowl the second weekend of the Texas State Fair (Oct. 6).
Oklahoma Sooners Football
All of the 2018 nonconference games are in Norman. Oklahoma also will have Baylor, Kansas State, Oklahoma State and Kansas at home. The Sooners have been virtually unbeatable when playing at home since Bob Stoops arrived on the scene in 1999. Since that time, OU has lost just 10 times at home in 116 games.
If Oklahoma is going to take home another Big 12 trophy in 2018, it is going to have to successfully navigate through road contests at Iowa State, TCU, Texas Tech, and West Virginia, all extremely difficult places for visiting teams to win.
It’s probably a good thing Stoops is no longer coaching the Sooners. You know how much he liked playing games with early morning start times. In 2018, Oklahoma doesn’t play a game that kicks off later than 12 noon until the fourth game of the season, at the earliest.
The Sooners have 11 a.m. starts against Florida Atlantic in the season opener in Norman on Sept. 1 and at Iowa State the second week of the season. The UCLA game, on Sept. 15, is a 12 noon start.
So what are OU’s chances of posting a 39th 10-win season? The Sooners have 38 10-win seasons all-time. That is the most in college football history, one more than Alabama. You also have to consider that Oklahoma has won 10 or more games in 15 of the last 18 seasons (14 of those coming under Bob Stoops).
According to both College Football News and Sporting News, the Sooners are a good bet to make it a 39th 10-win season and eighth in the past nine seasons. That’s what you call consistency.
Athlon Sports’ 2018 College Football Preview issue also agrees with the 10-win assessment for the Sooners, but took the “over,” going with 11 wins. Athlon projects OU to go undefeated in nonconference games, but lose twice in the Big 12 to go 7-2 in conference play.
My take on all of this is to take the over on 10 wins and up the ante by one and land on 11 wins. I see the Sooners winning all seven of their home games. Nothing really unusual about that, and it adds to the incredible trivia fact that Oklahoma has more Big 12 championships (11) than home losses (10) over the last 19 seasons.
I believe OU will stumble twice during the conference schedule, both losses coming on the road. Despite two consecutive wins in the annual Cotton Bowl slugfest with Texas and a 12-7 record over the Longhorns since the Stoops era began in 1999, I believe the Sooners will have their hands full against a much-improved Texas team that may have the most difficult schedule in the country this coming season.
That difficult Texas schedule could play in OU’s favor, but I see the law of averages catching up with the Sooners in this huge, emotional rivalry game that means so much to both sides and in which the best team frequently does not prevail.
The Sooners have two extremely tough true road games at TCU and West Virginia, the latter of which fall on the final weekend of the regular season and could be a preview of the Big 12 Championship game the following weekend. My crystal ball tells me Oklahoma will lose one of those games, but not both.
That only adds up to 10 wins, you say. The Sooners will post win No. 11 when they come out on top, for a fourth consecutive season and a 12th time in the Big 12 era, in the conference championship game.
With that 11th victory and the conference championship, Oklahoma should find itself once again knocking on the door of the College Football Playoff. Whether or not that will be enough to get them through the door, we’ll have to wait an see how all the cards fall and whose body of work speaks the loudest.