What if college football followed the same format as NCAA basketball and had a 64-team playoff? How would Oklahoma football come out in such an expanded format for the 2022 season?
For the past several years, the college football staff at ESPN have pondered such a question, and they’ve done so once again this week with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament tipping off around the country.
The Sooner men aren’t in this year’s edition of March Madness, but they would easily be within the cutline for a 64-team football playoff. This is all fictional, of course, because the College Football Playoff will never expand to that many teams and will remain where it is currently, at four teams, for the immediate future.
Oklahoma lost an uncharacteristic two conference games in the 2021 season and made a much-publicized change at starting quarterback midway through the season, replacing one former five-star recruit with another. The Sooners ended the 2021 campaign ranked 10th in both the Associated Press Top 25 and the Coaches Poll.
That was down several spots from where Oklahoma finished in the national rankings in the 2020 season.
Before either of those two college football seasons played out in real time, however, ESPN played out the 2020 and 2021 seasons, seeding a 64-team football bracket, as projected for the coming fall football season, in March 2020 and ’21 at the same time the NCAA Basketball Tournament brackets were being filled in. The Sooners were projected as a No. 1 seed ahead of both the 2020 and 2021 seasons.
An endeavor of this type is largely subjective and the seeding criteria, ESPN says, “is based to some degree on ESPN’s SP+ projections entering the 2022 (college football) season.”
In March 2020, Oklahoma was the No. 1 seed in the South Region in ESPN’s fictional 64-team NCAA Football Tournament for the projected 2020 season. The Sooners, who would have had Spencer Rattler at quarterback projected ahead to the fall of 2020, defeated Arizona and Cal and advanced to the Sweet 16 in ESPN’s mythical Dazzling December tournament before losing out to No. 4 seed USC.
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The ESPN staff played out another 64-team college football playoff in March of last year, looking ahead to the 2021 season. Oklahoma again earned a No. 1 along with Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State. The Sooners did even better in the 2021 fantasy tournament played out by the ESPN staff six months ahead of the actual 2021 season, advancing all the way to the Elite Eight, where the Sooners would lose to Georgia in the West Regional final after defeating North Carolina in the round of 16.
That brings us to March 2022 and time again for ESPN to bring out the crystal ball and project what a 64-team might look like this coming college football season. With all the uncertainty surrounding what Oklahoma will look like in 2022 under a totally revamped coaching staff and a new quarterback, the Sooners were awarded a No. 3 seed and placed in the West Region, where the top four seeds were No. 1 Michigan, Clemson, OU and, interestingly, USC.
The ESPN 64-team college football playoff projection for the 2022 season has Oklahoma coming from behind to edge Texas Tech 30-27 in the first round and following that with another close encounter in the second round against Wake Forest. Dillon Gabriel throws a touchdown pass on a third-and-long play late in the fourth quarter to get by Wake Forest 41-38.
The two wins advanced Oklahoma to the West Regional semifinals, where they were matched up against No. 2-seeded Clemson.
So. much like this weekend’ NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the prospective 64-team 2022 College Football Playoff is down to 16 teams. How will Oklahoma do? You’ll have to wait a few more days to find out?