Oklahoma Football: What’s Wrong With the Big 12 This Season?
By Chip Rouse
What’s wrong with Oklahoma football so far this season is the answer to the follow-up question everyone in college football seems to be asking: What’s wrong with the Big 12?
There shouldn’t be any controversy about the Big 12 not holding a championship game in football (beginning next season, however, the conference is reinstating a title game), because no team in the conference is elite enough to be in the College Football Playoff conversation this season, with or without a conference championship game.
Oh, sure, the Big 12 will crown a single champion in 2016, but that team could have as many as two losses and almost certainly won’t be undefeated at season’s end.
A month ago, the consensus was that Oklahoma was the dominant team in the Big 12 and if any team from the conference was good enough to make it into the College Football Playoff this season it would be the Sooners.
We’re not even through the opening month of the season, and that lofty projection has been capsized and washed ashore. Conference play has not begun yet, but from the looks of things, there appears to be a lot more parity among the top-feeders in the league than we first thought.
The Sooners, who at the beginning of the month were at No. 3 in the national rankings, have dropped all the way down to the bottom bar in the Associated Press Top 25 and appear highly vulnerable. Oklahoma travels to TCU for its next game, on Oct. 1, and we should be given an even better indication then of what to expect from Bob Stoops’ troops the remainder of the season.
This Saturday, Oklahoma State is at Baylor in a game featuring two of the “haves” in the Big 12 football tier structure. The week after that, the Cowboys host much-improved Texas, and seven days later the Sooners get their annual shot at archrival Texas in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
The point being that there is a strong likelihood this season that the “haves” – who I consider to be OU, TCU, Baylor, Oklahoma State and Texas – are going to beat up on each other to the extent that the team at the top when the dust finally settles in early December will be sitting there with at least one and perhaps two losses.
Despite the firing of head coach Art Briles, Baylor still appears to have quite a bit of talent remaining and cannot be counted out in the Big 12 title chase by any means. In fact, the Bears’ conference schedule isn’t particularly daunting until late in October and through the month of November, with games against Texas, TCU, Oklahoma and Kansas State in successive weeks.
Oklahoma State, projected to finish third in the preseason Big 12 football poll, has a couple of tough challenges right off the bat in Big 12 play, going up against Baylor, followed by a trip to Austin to face Texas. The Cowboys finish up the season with back-to-back road contests at TCU and Oklahoma.
We’ll get a fairly good read on how viable TCU’s run at the Big 12 crown will be in how the Horned Frogs match up with Oklahoma a week from this Saturday.
Overall, the parity, top to bottom (or at least top through No. 8) in the Big 12 is as prevalent as it has ever been in the league’s now 21 years in existence. The problem is the talent level in the Big 12, even among the top teams in the conference, is not on a par with the talent of the top teams in the SEC, Big Ten, Pac-12 or even the ACC.
The previous sentence won’t make many folks in college football’s heartland very happy, but it’s the brutal truth, and that is a major reason the Big 12 doesn’t fare very well against the top teams from other Power Five conferences.
No where is this talent discrepancy better reflected than in the recruiting class team rankings for the past three seasons. Oklahoma’s average class ranking over the last three years has been 17th, according to ESPN.com, with a high of 13th in 2014 and a low of 21st for the Sooners’ 2016 class.
In 2016, four Big 12 recruiting classes ranked in ESPN’s top 25 (10. Texas, 17. Baylor, 21. Oklahoma, and 23. TCU). That compares with nine schools from the Southeastern Conference, eight of which ranked higher than Oklahoma’s 21st-ranked class.
A year earlier, in 2015, just two Big 12 schools brought in recruiting classes ranked in the ESPN top 25: Texas, with the ninth-best class, and Oklahoma, at No. 17.
Ohio State, which pretty much had its way with Oklahoma last Saturday night, had the seventh-best recruiting class in 2014, according to ESPN, the sixth best the following year and the fifth best in 2016. So far this year, Ohio State stands No. 1 in the recruiting wars for the class of 2017.
Through last weekend, ESPN has Oklahoma’s 2017 commitments at No. 7 in the nation, which represents their best start this decade. If it were to hold that way, it would be the Sooners’ highest ranked recruiting class since
Survival in the Big 12 this season will be determined by the team that is most successful avoiding upsets against the teams that constitute the bottom half of the league, while winning at least two of the four games against the so-called top teams in the conference.
When it all shakes out, I still see Oklahoma as the best team and as the last team standing when the season is done. Here is how I see the ten Big 12 football teams finishing the 2016 season:
Projected 2016 Big 12 Football Standings
Oklahoma Sooners: 8-1, 10-2 overall
Texas Longhorns: 7-2, 9-3
TCU Horned Frogs: 6-3, 8-4
Baylor Bears: 6-3, 9-3
Oklahoma State Cowboys: 6-3, 8-4
West Virginia Mountaineers: 5-4, 7-5
Kansas State Wildcats: 3-6, 5-7
Texas Tech Red Raiders: 3-6, 5-7
Kansas Jayhawks: 1-8, 2-10
Iowa State Cyclones: 0-9, 1-11