In his first season as a head coach, Lincoln Riley led Oklahoma to a12-2 record, a third consecutive Big 12 championship and a spot in the College Football Playoff.
So where does Riley stand among all Power Five head coaches? According to CBS Sports, the Sooners’ head coach ranks 15th in the network’s annual ranking of head football coaches from the Power Five conferences.
There weren’t many surprises looking at the top coaches on the list. Alabama’s Nick Saban is the top name on the list, followed by Urban Myer of Ohio State, Dabo Swinney of Clemson and Jumbo Fisher, formerly of Florida State and now in his first season at Texas A&M.
Bob Stoops was in that elite grouping at the top of these rankings when he was still coaching: 3rd in 2015, 4th in 2016 and 6th in 2017 (before he announced his retirement).
In reality, Riley’s 15 ranking is an average of the ratings points he accumulated from the voters in the CBS Sports poll. A couple of voters, according to Tom Fornelli of CBS Sports, rated Riley in the top 10, and another had the OU head coach as high as 24.
This is probably a fair assessment of where Riley should be after just one season as a head coach. Most of the participants in the annual CBS Sports ranking of Power Five coaches acknowledged that Riley had inherited an outstanding situation in his first season and said they wanted to see what happened over the next several years when he had more of his own mark on the makeup of the team.
If you are a Sooner fan who feels Riley deserves a higher ranking than 15th, it is important to note that he is the only first-year head coach ranked in the top 25 heading into the 2018 college football season.
By comparison, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart ranked 54th in last year’s CBS Sports Power Five coaches ranking after his first season. He is No. 8 this year.