Oklahoma football: Why is Rodney Anderson only Sooner in SI’s Top 100?
By Chip Rouse
Oklahoma football player Rodney Anderson is No. 30 on Sports Illustrated’s Top 100 list of the best college players for 2018.
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That’s the good news. The bad news is he’s the only Oklahoma player to make the list, and I’m not buying it.
Anderson, a redshirt junior from Katy, Texas (one of 27 players on OU’s xx-man roster from the Lone Star State), led the Sooners in rushing last season with 1,161 yards on the ground and averaged over six yards per carry. He also caught 17 passes for 281 yards and five touchdowns.
The All-Big 12 second-team selection at running back is a deserving Top 100 honoree. This will be his second full season after being forced to miss his first two years in an OU uniform with season-ending injuries.
Bryce Love of Stanford (No. 2), A.J. Dillon of Boston College (17), and Ohio State’s J.K. Dobbins (26) are the only running backs listed higher than Anderson on the SI Top 100.
According to the editors at Sports Illustrated, the list is not based on past performance, but rather serves as a projection of how each players’ production is expected to “significantly impact his team’s success” in the coming season.
Someone please tell me why only one Sooner deserves to be on this list when there are nine players from Clemson who made the list, seven from Alabama, six each from Michigan and Washington and five from Wisconsin and Georgia. Even Ole Miss and Miami (Florida) managed to land four players on the list.
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Three players from Clemson made the top 10.
Even Duke produced two players on the list, for crying out loud.
That is outlandish. And only one player from OU is good enough to make the 100 best players in college football, looking ahead to the 2018 season?
What about wide receivers Marquise Brown or CeeDee Lamb, or offensive linemen Ben Powers and Bobby Evans, or even quarterback Kyler Murray, just to name a few.
Certainly two or three Sooners were deserving of being on the list.
Players from six Big 12 schools made the list, with West Virginia landing the most with three. Texas and TCU both had two players on the list and OU, Oklahoma State and Kansas State were fortunate, I suppose, to boast one each.
The SEC and Pac-12 ran away with top honors among the Power Five conferences, with 10 teams and seven teams, respectively, from those conferences placing players on SI’s Top 100 list. Six schools each from the Big 12 and Big Ten were represented on the list, and five schools from the ACC, dominated by Clemson.