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Oklahoma football: Sooners didn’t get much ‘College GameDay’ love in Week 0

By Chip Rouse

Sep 25, 2021; Chicago, Illinois, USA; The ESPN College Gameday team is seen on their studio set prior a game before the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Wisconsin Badgers at Soldier Field. Mandatory Credit: Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports
Sep 25, 2021; Chicago, Illinois, USA; The ESPN College Gameday team is seen on their studio set prior a game before the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Wisconsin Badgers at Soldier Field. Mandatory Credit: Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports /
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You know the college football season is back when the ESPN “College GameDay” crew makes its season debut on Saturday morning television. The ESPN “GameDay” team is back on the job, but they aren’t in agreement about Oklahoma football getting back to the top of the Big 12 in Year 1 of the Brent Venables era.

In years past, the College GameDay crew has at worst been mixed about Oklahoma’s championship status as a national title contender. The GameDay team had its season debut broadcast on Saturday, and the Sooners were an afterthought in any and all conversation having anything to do with national championship contention and even the Big 12 title race.

Probably no college team, certainly none at the Power Five conference level, has undergone more disruption and change than the Oklahoma football program. Despite the head-coaching change from Lincoln Riley to Brent Venables and all the player comings and goings, however, the consensus among college football analysts and pollsters is that the Sooners are still a top-10 team, at least until proven otherwise.

Oklahoma received no mention from the GameDay panel as one of the teams that will find itself in the four-team College Football Playoff and a shot at the national championship. Actually, none of the Big 12 teams made it into that conversation.

That means that none of the GameDay crew felt that the Big 12 champion would be worthy of what would likely be the one remaining Playoff spot after Alabama, Ohio State and likely Georgia had locked up the three other spots.

And that’s not the worst of it if you’re an Oklahoma fan.

When the conversation came around to who would win the Big 12 this season, only former Georgia All-American David Pollack sided with the Sooners. Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard predicted reigning conference champion Baylor would repeat, and Lee Corso projected Texas to win the Big 12 in 2022.

It’s been a few years — maybe a half dozen — since the Sooners weren’t the preseason choice of all four of the GameDay analysts to win the Big 12. This might not be a bad thing for Oklahoma, though. Playing the underdog role, at least as the GameDay personalities choose to view this season’s college football landscape, could light a little extra fire in the Sooner players, which is never a bad thing.

Making the College Football Playoff is probably a stretch for OU this season — a stretch but not an impossibility — but winning the Big 12 is clearly in the Sooners’ reach. David Pollack thinks so, and so do we.

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