Oklahoma football: Can the Sooners sustain same success looking 3 years out?

Oklahoma football, like most college teams, is most concerned with the here and now, but the best programs are also planning and building for the future.

The Sooners are well aware of and buoyed by their storied and successful past, but they also know their fan base has blinders on with regard to what happened yesterday. The only thing that matters is what is happening now. Success can be very fleeting, however, if you are only operating in the short term and lose sight of the bigger picture.

It’s not unusual for good teams to catch a wave for a few years because of good recruiting, talent at quarterback and at other key positions and superb coaching — and typically a combination of all three — but what separates the great programs from the good is the ability to feed the beast by keeping the talent pipeline flowing, always striving to get better and building for tomorrow, not just for today.

This is the time of year on the college football calendar when the preview magazines begin hitting the newsstands and mail boxes with their fall story lines and still-too-early top-25 rankings for the forthcoming season.

Oklahoma Sooners Football

ESPN staff writer Adam Rittenberg has taken it a step further by projecting what the power rankings of the top 25 teams will look like three years from now.

Over the past two decades, Oklahoma football has been the picture of sustained success. Bob Stoops’ Sooner teams won 11 or more games 12 times in his 18 seasons and reached double-digit wins 14 times, and Lincoln Riley took over where Stoops left off, delivering two 12-win seasons that led to back-to-back appearances in the College Football Playoff.

Stoops won a national championship at Oklahoma in 2000 and played for three more BCS national titles and in a College Football Playoff.

According to Rittenberg, there should be no letup in that standard of success at Oklahoma for the immediate future.

Rittenberg has appended ESPN’s annual College Football Power Index, which ranks teams based on their projected performance going forward for the remainder of a given season. He has expanded that concept by looking out three years, to 2021, and projecting who will be the top-25 teams in college football three years from now.

Rittenberg looks at quarterback strength, offensive strength and defensive strength as a basis for the future projection. It probably isn’t a huge surprise that he has Clemson, Alabama and Georgia as the top three college teams in his Future Power Rankings. The No. 4 team is Oklahoma, and that probably is where the Sooners deserve to be given the uncertainties surrounding the defense.

The Sooners are set at the quarterback position for the next several years, with Alabama transfer Jalen Hurts taking the reins for the 2019 season and Spencer Rattler, the No. 1 quarterback in the 2019 national recruiting class waiting in the wings. And as long as Riley is in Norman, you can expect that the OU offense will remain loaded at the skill positions and as potent as ever.

Rittenberg rates the Sooner quarterback strength and offensive firepower as the second best in the country over the next three years. Like Sooner fans, Rittenberg is optimistic Alex Grinch, the new OU defensive coordinator, can get things turned around on the defensive side of the ball.

"“Grinch upgraded Washington State’s defense and brings a strong reputation to Norman,” Rittenberg writes. “He might be the nation’s most important coordinator hire in years. The key area to watch is the defensive line, which hasn’t produced many memorable players in recent years.”"

It is interesting to note that ESPN’s initial 2019 preseason Football Power Index has Oklahoma at No. 6, one spot lower than the Sooners’ final 2018 FPI ranking. OU is ranked below No. 1 Clemson, Alabama, Georgia, LSU and Michigan in the 2019 preseason power rankings, largely because of questions on defense and special teams.

For Sooner fans who are beginning to get the itch for football, the 2019 Oklahoma season opener, at home against Houston on Sept. 1, is 81 days away.