This is the eighth year of the College Football Playoff era, and an Oklahoma football team has been a participant in four of them.
But not this year. Only Alabama and Clemson have been to the College Playoff more often than the Sooners. OU and Ohio State are tied at four appearances apiece.
The big difference is that those three other teams — representatives of the SEC, ACC and Big Ten, respectively — own a combined Playoff record of 16-9 and have five national championships between them.
The Sooners are the only team that have made it into the College Football Playoff at least two times and have failed to make it out of the national semifinal round. Bob Stoops coached one of those four OU Playoff teams (2015), and Lincoln Riley has been at the helm for the other three (2017, 2018 and 2019).
Oklahoma’s best chance to advance to the national championship game in the CFP era probably was in 2017, when Baker Mayfield and the Sooners were the No. 2 seed. The Sooners led the Georgia Bulldogs 31 to 114 in the first half, but couldn’t hold onto the lead and eventually lost 54-48 in double overtime.
ESPN staff writer Bill Connelly has come up with a ranking of the 28 teams have competed in the seven Playoff seasons before this one. Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Oklahoma accounted for 20 of the 28 appearances leading up to the 2020 season.
The 2017 Sooners are the highest ranked of Oklahoma’s four Playoff teams, according to Connelly’s computation, at No. 17. The Georgia team that beat the Sooners in the 2017 Playoff ranks 12th.
Unfortunately, but perhaps not all that surprising given the Sooners’ explicit lack of success in the CFP years they have been one of the final four teams standing, none of the other three Oklahoma teams that made the Playoff ranked as high as the 2017 Sooners.
The 2018 Sooner team quarterbacked by Kyler Murray ranked 21st of the 28 Playoff teams in Connelly’s historic Playoff rankings. That team lost to No. 1-seed Alabama, 45-34.
The 2015 Oklahoma team that featured transfer quarterback Mayfield, in his first season at OU, and first-year offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley, ranked 23rd. The Sooners lost 37-17 to the Clemson Tigers and quarterback Deshaun Watson.
And the worst of the four Oklahoma Playoff teams was the 2019 edition of the Sooners, led by Alabama transfer Jalen Hurts, who had played in the national championship game in each of the three previous seasons. That didn’t seem to matter that much as eventual national champion LSU handed the Sooners their most lopsided loss in 52 previous postseason appearances.
Connelly ranked the 2019 LSU team No, 1 of all 28 College Football Playoff teams through the 2019 season.
That could be a short-lived No. 1 ranking, however, as this year’s Alabama team appears to be one of the most dominant teams in college football history. The Crimson Tide will have to get by No. 3 seed Ohio State on Jan. 11, though, before they can legitimately make that claim.