CBS college football analyst Rick Neuheisel didn’t win any friends among Oklahoma football fans on Saturday.
The CBS college football analyst and former college head coach said during a college football preview program on Saturday that Oklahoma’s reign atop the Big 12 is over. He picked the state of Oklahoma to retain the conference trophy, but said that it will soon reside in Stillwater and not Norman.
Neuheisel, who played quarterback for UCLA in the early 1980s and was later head coach at Colorado, Washington and UCLA, before becoming a college football analyst for CBS Sports beginning in 2015, said on Saturday that Oklahoma State would defeat Oklahoma in the 2020 Big 12 Championship game and end the Sooners’ five-year reign as conference champions.
Neuheisel failed to mention that the regular-season game between OU and OSU this year is in Norman.
The Cowboys’ schedule is favorable this season, with home games against Texas and Iowa State, two of the top five teams in the Big 12 Preseason Media Poll that, incidentally, overwhelmingly favored the Sooners to win a sixth consecutive Big 12 crown.
If Oklahoma State is going to end Oklahoma’s Big 12 title reign, the Cowboys are probably going to have to beat the Sooners twice. The Cowboys could win in Norman on Nov. 21, but that would mean they probably would have to do it all over again in the Big 12 title game on Dec. 12 or 19, and Lincoln Riley has not lost to the same team twice in the same season in the three seasons since the Big 12 Championship game was re-established.
For the record, Oklahoma owns an 89-18-7 record all-time against their in-state rivals. The Sooners have also won 13 Big 12 championships; Oklahoma State has one Big 12 title in football (2011).
In the interest of full disclosure, we should point out that Brian Jones, who teams with Neuheisel and studio host Adam Zucker on CBS college football halftime and postgame shows during the season and is a former Texas Longhorn, picked the Sooners to prevail this season in the Big 12. But in doing so, but he said that the Sooners would receive a big title challenge from his beloved Longhorns as well as Oklahoma State.