It may not feel like it, but this is the unofficial preseason of college football, and that means we are going to start reading a lot more about Oklahoma football and the upcoming 2020 season.
That assumes, of course, that there will be a 2020 season. Recent events, with numerous college teams reporting multiple cases of players testing positive for COVID-19 upon return to their respective campus sites, has fueled new concerns about whether there will be live football on Saturdays in the fall.
Oklahoma has been an outlier in this whole process of bringing players back for voluntary group workouts. Sooner players will return this coming Wednesday, nearly a month after most major programs around the country.
Whether the extra time to prepare facilities and protocols for the players’ return will help prevent coronavirus exposure among the Sooner players is still to be determined, but there is no question that Lincoln Riley and his staff are taking things more seriously than most in the “new normal”COVID-19 world we are all experiencing.
Meanwhile, all the college football preview publications are flooding the marketplace with their projections and preseason All-America teams, and as the calendar turns over to July, the cascade of national award watch lists will start grabbing sports headlines. Just like normal for this time of year, only this year things are anything but normal.
Earlier this month, Oklahoma junior center Creed Humphrey was named to the Walter Camp 2020 Preseason All-America First Team.
This past week, Humphrey was a first-team selection on the Sporting News 2020 Preseason All-America Team. As a freshman two seasons ago, Humphrey was the anchor on the offensive line that was voted the best in college football and winner of the Joe Moore Award. A year ago, the home-grown native Oklahoman (from Shawnee) was a finalist for the Rimington Award, recognizing college football’s best interior lineman.
Humphrey is joined on the SN Preseason All-America Team by Sooner kicker Gabe Brkic. As a redshirt freshman last season, Brkic was perfect in his field-goal attempt, going 17 for 17, including four of greater than 40 yards. He also was successful in all 52 of his extra-point tries.