Oklahoma football: Five bold not-so-great predictions for the 2018 Sooners
By Chip Rouse
This is the time of year when college football previews and predictions run wild. And for Oklahoma football, that generally means time to ramp up the excitement because of a bright outlook for the season ahead.
Most every “way-too-early” and preseason poll out there so far has the Sooners among the nation’s top-10 college teams to begin the 2018 season. That’s a nice vote of confidence, but really is irrelevant in terms of being a meaningful measure. You still have to play the games and, as they say, it’s not how you start out but how and where you finish that defines a season.
The Sooners have a solid history of finishing well, as evidenced by their overall record of 202-50 since 2000. OU has dominated the Big 12 in football the past 18 seasons. The Sooners have won 11 conference titles during that time. No other Big 12 team has won more than three in the league’s 22-year history.
The Sooners are virtually a consensus pick to win the Big 12 again in 2018 and should begin the season ranked among the country’s top-10 teams when the USA Today Preseason Coaches Poll and the Associated Press Preseason Top 25 come out in the next few weeks.
Oklahoma has begun the season ranked in the top 10 in the AP poll 15 times in the last 17 years.
The sun is coming up bright and bold for the Sooners on the dawn of another college football season, which brings us to five audacious and somewhat annoying predictions for the 2018 edition of Oklahoma football: