Attention Sooner Nation: The wait for the kickoff of the 2016 Oklahoma football season is now down to double digits, with 94 days remaining until the Sooners open the new season against the University of Houston.
A 10-win season has been almost a given for Oklahoma football under head coach Bob Stoops, and the Las Vegas handicappers are projecting another double-digit win total for the Sooners in the coming season.
Stoops’ Sooner teams have won 10 or more games 13 times in his 17 seasons on the OU sidelines, including nine Big 12 championships (eight of them outright). Another way of looking at Stoops’ undeniable success at Oklahoma is that the Sooners have failed to reach double digits in wins only four times since his arrival in 1999.
The guys in Las Vegas that handicap college football for a living are betting that Oklahoma will achieve double digits in wins again in 2016, projecting the Sooners not only to reach the 10-win level but also a 10th Big 12 championship.
Vegasinsider.com has come out with its initial projections for win totals for the coming season for teams in 10 FBS Conferences and four independents (Notre Dame. BYU, Army and UMass).
The Sooners are one of just five teams expected to post at least 10 wins in the coming season – and, we might add, with arguably the most difficult schedule of any team in the country.
Only Clemson, which the Vegas oddsmakers have at 10.5 wins, fared better than Oklahoma at this early stage of the college football handicapping season. The three other teams projected at the 10-win level are the familiar names of Alabama and LSU in the Southeastern Conference, plus Michigan in the Big Ten.
Regarding the rest of the Big 12, Baylor and Oklahoma State are projected as the prime challengers to the Sooners in the coming season, with 9 and 8.5 wins, respectively. It should be noted, though, that these projections were made before Art Briles was dismissed and all the recent trouble came out concerning the Baylor football program.
Here is how the remainder of the Big 12 fared, according to Vegasinsider.com: TCU (8), Texas Tech (7), Texas (6.5), West Virginia (6.5), Kansas State (5.5), Iowa State (3.5) and Kansas (1.5).