Oklahoma football: Sooners No. 5 in ESPN 3-Year Power Rankings

Greatness in college football isn’t defined in one-year increments. It’s defined in sustained success, something that Oklahoma football fans have enjoyed plenty of over the past nearly seven decades.

No college team has won more football games since the end of World War II, considered to be the modern era of college football, than the Oklahoma Sooners. Since 1946, OU football has produced 640 wins. The next closest team is Ohio State with 595.

Over that time, OU has won seven national championships and been a runner-up for several more, has had six Heisman Trophy winners and three different head coaches (Bud Wilkinson, Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops) compile more than 100 wins each. These three gentlemen are credited with 57 percent of Oklahoma’s all-time win total, which stands at 884, eighth most nationally..

Oklahoma actually has had four football coaches win at least 100 games. The fourth (Bennie Owen) was of a different era, having served as the Sooners head coach for 22 seasons back in the early part of the 1900s.

Lincoln Riley is the 22nd head coach in OU football history. Last season was year one of the Riley head-coaching era, and he has taken up right where Bob Stoops left off, winning almost every football game, a conference championship and vying for a national crown.

Oklahoma finished third in the 2017 season in the final Associated Press rankings and appears well-positioned to contend for the national championship not just in the coming 2018 season, but for several seasons beyond that.

ESPN has projected out its College Football Power Rankings, looking beyond the 2018 season and where the best 25 teams in college football will rank, taking into account their anticipated performance over the next three seasons, or through 2020.

It should be no surprise, notes ESPN staff writer Adam Rittenberg, that the teams at the top of the list are the usual suspects. Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State are the top three in the ESPN Future Power Rankings, but Oklahoma is right there, too, at No. 5. Georgia is the team that sits between the Sooners and the top three on the list.

"“Oklahoma has some good options at quarterback, even if Kyler Murray only plays one more season,” Rittenberg writes.“The Sooners bring back young standouts at running back (Rodney Anderson and Trey Sermon) and wide receiver (Marquise Brown and CeeDee Lamb). and arguably the best offensive line in 2017 brings back three starters.”"

Projections are just that, predictions or educated guesses at what could and perhaps should happen, but we all know that stuff happens over the course of a season that can easily change the outcome of games as well as an entire season.

Good football teams have a way and a will to make things happen, usually in their favor. It’s good to have everyone seemingly on your side before the games start, but you still have to go out and play the games.

Every team starts out on equal footing before the season starts. It’s what happens between the lines after the games start that counts. The truly great college teams are able to make every game and every season count and sustain success and a winning culture over an extended period.

Oklahoma football fans have been treated to high win counts and a high national standing, and for an extraordinarily long period of time, that all but a very select few college teams and fan bases can only dream of.

That sustained success — past, present, and anticipated in the future — to a large extent, is what is reflected in the top-five ranking of Oklahoma football, looking out three years from now. It’s up to the Sooner coaches and the players now to go out and prove all the clairvoyant college-football types right, or wrong, depending on their point of view.

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