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Oklahoma football: Sooners 16th in final College Football Playoff rankings

By Chip Rouse

IRVING, TX - OCTOBER 16: A detail view of the College Football Playoff logo shown during a press conference on October 16, 2013 in Irving, Texas. Condoleezza Rice, Stanford University professor and former United States Secretary of State, was chosen to serve as one of the 13 members that will select four teams to compete in the first playoff at the end of the 2014 season. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
IRVING, TX - OCTOBER 16: A detail view of the College Football Playoff logo shown during a press conference on October 16, 2013 in Irving, Texas. Condoleezza Rice, Stanford University professor and former United States Secretary of State, was chosen to serve as one of the 13 members that will select four teams to compete in the first playoff at the end of the 2014 season. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images) /
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The College Playoff hopes for the 2021 edition of Oklahoma football effectively vanished several weeks ago when the Sooners suffered their first loss of the season at Baylor.

The final CFP rankings for the 2021 season were released on Sunday with No. 1 Alabama, No. 2 Michigan, No. 3 Georgia and No. 4 Cincinnati claiming the prized top-four spots that will vie for the national championship. Notre Dame, at No. 5, and Ohio State, No. 6, were the two teams just outside of the top-four cutline.

Oklahoma was ranked 16th in the final CFP rankings, down two spots from No. 14 a week ago. Big 12 champion Baylor finished at No. 7, Oklahoma State No. 9.

This was the first time since 2015 that Oklahoma finished lower than No. 7 in the final CFP rankings. In the last five seasons, beginning with 2020, the Sooners finished 6th, 4th, 4th, 2nd, 7th and 4th, respectively.

Although OU’s loss to Baylor was preceded by nine consecutive wins to start the season, there were plenty of questions surrounding the credibility of Oklahoma’s undefeated record based on the quality, or lack thereof, of most of those victories.

Five of the Sooners’ opening nine wins were by seven or fewer points, and in a 12-point win over last-place Kansas, a team that had won just four conference games in the previous five seasons, Oklahoma trailed 17-14 going into the fourth quarter.

The Sooners would go on to defeat Iowa State before losing a fiercely fought Bedlam rivalry game with Oklahoma State to end the regular season. That gave Oklahoma a most respectable but highly unsatisfying 10-2 record heading into the postseason, which will be a very anti-climatic season end based on Oklahoma standards.

It looks like Oklahoma (10-2) is headed to the Valero Alamo Bowl on Dec. 29 as the Big 12’s third-best team this season. Their likely opponent will be Oregon out of the Pac 12. At one time this season Oregon (10-3) was the No. 3 team in the CFP rankings, but the Ducks were totally embarrassed two weeks in a row by Utah, in the regular-season finale and then again in the Pac-12 championship game.

All things considered, there shouldn’t be much of an argument that the Sooners were more deserving than their No. 14 final CFP ranking. The fact that OU started out at No. 9 when the initial CFP rankings were released in early November, even with a 9-0 record, told us early on that the playoff selection committee wasn’t impressed with the Sooners. And, as it turns out, for good reason.

In the fantasy world of ifs and buts, there was a lot of hopeful talk before the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State game that if the Sooners were able to defeat their in-state rivals in the regular-season finale and manage to pull off the same feat a week later in the Big 12 Championship, there was still an outside chance that the Big 12 champion could make it into the College Football Playoff.

Given how championship Saturday turned out, however, with Alabama crushing former No. 1 Georgia and Michigan and Cincinnati both handily winning their respective conference championship game, it is highly doubtful a one-loss Big 12 champion would have jumped any of those four teams and gotten into the playoff.

Things haven’t stopped going downhill for OU football since the loss at Oklahoma State a little over a week ago.

Head coach Lincoln Riley shocked the Sooner Nation if not the entire college football world, announcing that he was leaving Oklahoma to take the head-coaching job at USC. Not only was Riley skipping town, but four of his assistants flew the coup with him. And then on Monday, in the wake of the Riley move, a host of top Oklahoma recruits who had originally committed to the Sooners and Riley began changing their minds on where they wanted to play college football.

So with no head coach in the fold as of midday Sunday and with the season-long suspect OU football program continuing to spring leaks from the aftershocks of the Riley departure, the 16th spot in the final CFP rankings, well below two other Big 12 schools, sort of feels appropriate under the circumstances.

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