Oklahoma football: Where does Lincoln Riley rank among top coaches in 2021?

Lincoln Riley is almost half way to becoming the fifth Oklahoma football coach to achieve at least 100 wins. And he’s done so in just four seasons.

OU is the only school in college football history to have as many as four coaches reach the century level in victories, and the 36-year-old Riley is on track to up that number to five.

Ask anybody who follows or covers college football who the top active head coaches are and the names Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney invariably are at the top of the list, and deservedly so, given their incredible record of sustained success.

There have been seven national championships decided under the College Football Playoff format. Saban and Swinney have combined to win five of them. Alabama and Clemson have played against each other in three of them, with Clemson, taking home the championship trophy twice.

Winning championships is the ultimate goal of every college program, and Saban and Swinney are clearly at the top of that list in recent history.

But there are several other college head coaches who are knocking at that same door, and OU’s Riley is one of those at the front of the line.

There are few coaches in college football who wouldn’t give almost anything to achieve what Riley has done at Oklahoma in just four years leading the program. The 37-year-old Sooner head coach has won four consecutive Big 12 championships and taken his team to three consecutive College Football Playoffs. He has mentored two Heisman Trophy winning quarterbacks and been the architect of three offensive teams that finished in the top three nationally.

About the only thing Riley hasn’t accomplished is win a national championship, something seven Oklahoma teams have done before. But to play for and win a national championship in the CFP era you must get beyond the first game, and that is something Riley’s OU teams have been unable to do in their three previous appearances.

That may be about to change, however, as Oklahoma remains a dangerous as ever offensively, and the defense has gotten much better in defensive coordinator Alex Grinch’s two seasons on the OU coaching staff.

The coming 2021 season could be Riley’s best shot yet to not only get to the playoff, but get over the first-game hurdle and play for an eighth national championship.

Given all, this, I, for one, am not surprise to see Riley ranked third on the 247Sports annual ranking of active college football coaches. A year ago, in the same ranking, Riley was ranked No. 7.

Moving up to the No. 3 spot from a year ago, the Sooner head coach passed Ryan Day of Ohio State, Jimbo Fisher of Texas A&M and Georgia’s Kirby Smart. That represents a solid endorsement of what Riley means to Oklahoma in particular and college football in general.

In compiling the rankings, the 247Sports college-football staff utilizes the 2021 Power Five Coach Rankings put together by its sister organization, CBS Sports, as well as a ranking of every FBS college head coach by Sporting News.