With the 2019 college football season now in the rear-view mirror, all eyes turn to next season, and the question for Oklahoma football fans is: Where will the 2020ners stack up among the nation’s best teams?
The 2020 season is still nearly eight months off, but it’s never too early, it seems, to begin thinking about what might be the next time around. And several national media outlets have jump-started the process with their annual “Way too Early” forecasts of what the college football preseason Top 25 will look like come this fall.
LSU’s national championship victory over Clemson wasn’t even 24 hours old before college football prognosticators were busy predicting who the national contenders were going to be in 2020. So far, the experts who closely follow this stuff for a living have Clemson and Ohio State as the two teams in the best position to land in next year’s national championship game scheduled for the Orange Bowl in Miami.
Alabama and LSU are also top-five choices for next season. Oklahoma falls between five and seven in the early WTE polling.
Sports Illustrated, Sporting News and 247Sports picked the Sooners to begin next season at No. 7 in their “Way too Early” projections. ESPN has OU starting out at No. 8. CBS Sports apparently has more faith in the 2020 edition of Oklahoma football, ranking the Sooners at No. 5.
Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports seems to have the most positive view of Oklahoma football next season.
"“After three straight transfer quarterbacks, Oklahoma enters a new quarterback era,” he writes. “Traditional recruits Spencer Rattler will battle for the starting spot. Neither has much experience.“The biggest loss on defense is All-Big 12 linebacker Kenneth Murray going to the NFL. The Sooners will be favored to win a sixth straight Big 12 title after a crushing Peach Bowl loss to end the season.”"
By contrast, ESPN senior writer Mark Schlabach says, “(the Sooners) 63-28 loss to LSU in a CFP semifinal at the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl was a humbling reminder of how far they still have to go on defense to compete with the sport’s elite.”
Time will ultimately tell, but historically Oklahoma has done better when preseason expectations aren’t an overreach based more on idealism and the OU football brand than realism.