Making it to the College Football Playoff is difficult enough, let alone doing it for three consecutive years as Lincoln Riley’s Oklahoma football Sooners have done.
The Sooners have participated as Big 12 champions in four of the last five College Football Playoffs, but have not gotten beyond the first game in all four appearances.
The NCAA this week cancelled all of it fall sports championships except for football in the in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision, stating that if half of the schools playing a particular sport are not playing in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic you can’t have a legitimate national championship.
At this point in time, the Big 12, ACC and SEC are moving ahead with plans to play football this fall. The same appears to be so for the American Athletic Conference, Conference USA and the Sun Belt Conference. This certainly could all change between now and the start of the season, but that leaves 79 of the 130 FBS teams planning to make a go of it in the fall.
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The College Football Playoff selection committee met this week and plans to crown a champion from the fall season and follow the same selection process they have used in previous years.
It is unclear at this point how college football will handle the situation if the Big Ten and Pac-12 in fact go through with their plans to compete in a spring season. Will there be co-national champions representing the fall and spring seasons?
At the very least, there will probably be an asterisk attached to the fall national champion, with two major conferences being left out of the process.
But it also means that the Big 12 champion should be assured a spot as one of the four teams selected to participate in this year’s College Football Playoff. The Sooners have won five consecutive Big 12 titles and are shooting for a sixth straight and 14th overall in 2020.
The CFP semifinals are scheduled to be played on New Year’s Day, 2021, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, and the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. The CFP championship game is slated for Jan. 11 at the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, Florida. The Sooners lost to Georgia in double overtime in the 2017 Playoff semifinals at the Rose Bowl, and to Alabama in the semifinal round the following year at the Orange Bowl in Miami.
Last season, Oklahoma was throttled by eventual national champion LSU at CFP semifinals held at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.