Oklahoma football back where it started, at No. 7 in AP poll
By Chip Rouse
With the first edition of the 2018 College Playoff rankings set to come out on Tuesday, Oklahoma football moved up another spot this week, to No. 7, in both the Associated Press and Coaches polls.
The Sooners (7-1, 4-1), coming off a 51-14 thrashing of Kansas State, benefited from the loss by previous-No. 6 Texas to Oklahoma State on Saturday night and moved up one position in both the AP Top 25 and the Coaches Poll.
Oklahoma is back where it began the season. The Sooners were ranked seventh in the 2018 Associated Press preseason poll. They started out No. 5 in the Coaches Poll. After losing to Texas in Week 6, however, OU dropped to 11th in both polls, and has been slowly working its way back up since then.
Texas fell nine spots in the AP poll and eight spots in the Coaches Poll, to No. 15, leaving the Sooners as again the highest-ranked Big 12 team.
West Virginia is the only other ranked team from the Big 12 this week. The Mountaineers are ranked 10th in the Coaches Poll and 12th by the Associated Press.
Whether the Texas loss will ultimately help or hurt Oklahoma’s College Football Playoff hopes is yet to be determined, but with just four games remaining in the regular season, it definitely leveled the playing field among the contenders and signaled that there is no easy path to the Big 12 championship.
OU, West Virginia and Texas each now have one conference loss and Texas Tech is right there also with two losses. A pair of Big 12 games next weekend will have an important say on how the Big 12 title race shakes out, with Oklahoma playing at Texas Tech and Texas hosting West Virginia.
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The Sooners are ranked No. 4 this week in the ESPN Football Power Index, which is a measure of a team’s strength as a predictor of how that team will perform through the remainder of the regular season. In the case of OU, the FPI projects the Sooners with a 29.8 percent chance of winning out and a 60.5 percent of winning the Big 12.