Can OU Football Break Out of Its Preseason Top-Five Curse?
By Chip Rouse
OU football is no stranger to high national rankings. It is part of the Sooner DNA, as head coach Bob Stoops likes to say.
No college team has been ranked for more weeks among the top-five teams in the Associated Press Top 25 poll than Oklahoma. That dates back 80 years, to 1936, when the AP Top 25 poll began. The Sooners have been in that position for a total of 392 weeks.
As terrific as that sounds, being ranked that high to begin a season – in other words, a high standing in the plethora of preseason national polls that serve little more purpose than to whet the insatiable appetites of ravenous college football fans – has not always been the harbinger it is hyped up to be for the Sooners of the gridiron, particularly in the team’s recent history.
According to Phil Steele, college football expert and publisher of the eponymous annual college football preview magazine that bears his name, the last four times Oklahoma was ranked in the preseason top-five, which it is in most early projections this year, the Sooners finished no higher than 15th in the final Associated Press poll, and in two of those years they finished outside of the top 25.
It pains me a little to point this out, but as much as we like seeing the Sooners getting lots of love and positive attention from the media in advance of the start to the season, the boys in crimson and cream tend to fare better when they are not the center of attention, bearing the pressure that comes with it and wearing a target on their back as a highly ranked team.
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Beginning the season a little under the radar – which is almost an oxymoron when you are talking about the Oklahoma Sooners in football throughout most of its history in the past 60-plus years – has turned out much better of late than being touted as a top-five team in the preseason.
Three times under head coach Bob Stoops when the Sooners have been ranked outside of the top 10 to start the season they have won a national championship (2000), a berth in the College Football Playoff (2015) and finished No. 6 in the final AP poll.
Oklahoma began the 2015 season ranked 19th in the preseason AP poll, but worked its way all the way up to No. 3 in the nation at the Week 13 pole in the regular season. As everyone knows, the Sooners earned the No, 4 spot in the College Football Playoff a season ago, but dropped to No. 5 in the final AP poll for the 2015 season after suffering a 37-17 loss to Clemson in their national semifinal contest.
The year before that, the Sooners started the season at No. 4, but were nowhere to be found in the final top 25 after being badly humbled by the same Clemson team in a 24-point postseason bowl rout in the Russell Athletic Bowl.
So that brings us around to 2016, and the sincere hope that this is the year that Bob Stoops & Co. are able to break the top-five preseason curse and get the Sooners a return trip to the College Football Playoff, where they have some unfinished business.