Oklahoma football one of the college game’s resident blue bloods
By Chip Rouse
It’s something that Oklahoma football fans never tire of hearing. Sooner football has long been considered one of the nation’s elite college programs.
It is not a status, however, to which you gain a life membership. It is one, however, you have to consistently earn and maintain over a lifetime, or at least over multiple decades.
A number of years back – 10, to be exact – Sports Illustrated senior writer Stewart Mandel took on the task of defining what it is that constitutes a national power, using college football as the case example.
The goal, Mandel said, was not to rank programs solely based on winning percentage, national championships bowl wins or any other quantitative measure. “A national power,” he wrote, “carries (with it) a certain cachet or aura. It’s the way a program is perceived by (the fans).
In his examination of major college football programs, Mandel concluded there were several levels of so-called national powers. He came up with four different levels and likened them to what he termed a “four-tiered Feudal society.”
The level classifications he used in his article, which first appeared in November 2007, were, in order of prestige, “Kings,” “Barons,” “Knights” and “Peasants.” You can refer back to the original article for Mandel’s descriptions of the various levels.
By now, you’ve probably figured out that the Sooners are ranked in the top level of Mandel’s classification of “national power” strata.
Mandel has revisited his “Program Pecking Order” article in five-year intervals (in 2012 and again this spring) since it was first published, checking to determine if there were any appreciable changes in public perception over a half-decade. His conclusion: very few, if any.
What has not changed, as far as Sooner football fans are concerned, is that Oklahoma is still firmly entrenched, in Mandel’s analysis, as one of the “Kings’ of college football, and rightfully so.
Call it Oklahoma and the dozen other “Kings” of college football:
Alabama Crimson Tide
Florida Gators
Florida State Seminoles
LSU Tigers
Miami Hurricanes
Nebraska Cornhuskers
Notre Dame Fighting Irish
Ohio State Buckeyes
Oklahoma Sooners
Penn State Nittany Lions
Texas Longhorns
USC Trojans
Classifications for other Big 12 teams
Barons: West Virginia
Knights: Kansas State, Oklahoma State, TCU, Texas Tech
Peasants: Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas
As a matter of full disclosure, Mandel now writes for FoxSports.com. He has Oklahoma ranked No. 8 in his 2017 post-spring top-25 college football rankings. Alabama is No. 1. Ohio State, who the Sooners play in the second weekend of the season next fall, is No. 2, and Oklahoma State is ranked ahead of OU, at No. 6.