Oklahoma football: Two ESPN writers have Sooners in New Year’s Six bowl
By Chip Rouse
The Big 12 race this season appears to be as wide open as any time in recent memory, and for the Oklahoma football team that is unfamiliar territory.
Before Baylor rose to the top of the league last season claiming its first Big 12 championship, the Sooners had won six consecutive conference titles and 14 in the 26-year history of the conference.
A general review of the numerous 2022 Big 12 championship projections show a tight battle between Oklahoma, Baylor and Oklahoma State, with Texas as an outlier and Kansas State as a surprise challenger. The annual Big 12 Preseason Media Poll, voted on by the media who cover the Big 12 and the teams in the conference, picked Baylor to repeat as conference champions with the Sooners a close second.
The college football staff at The Athletic had a completely different take. Their projection of how the Big 12 standings will end up at season’s end have Oklahoma at the top, followed by Texas, Oklahoma State, Baylor and Kansas State. We share this particular example to show exactly how wide-open the Big 12 race appears as we enter Week 1 of the new season.
The dust probably won’t settle on all of this until the game clock runs out in the Big 12 Championship game on Dec. 3 at Jerry’s World (AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas).
This past week, two ESPN college football writers, Mark Schlabach and Kyle Bonagura, projected their matchups for the major postseason bowl destinations. Let’s get this out of the way right upfront. They did not project a Big 12 team making the College Football Playoff. They went the conventional direction, predicting that Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia would live up to what practically every college football expert on the planet expects this season and end up in the playoff. Clemson was their choice to garner the fourth and final spot.
Both ESPN writers, however, projected a matchup of Oklahoma and Texas A&M in the New Year’s Six Sugar Bowl. By doing so, they are also implying that the Sooners will win the Big 12 Championship, because the conference rules state that if a Big 12 team is not one of the teams in the College Football Playoff, the Big 12 champion would be the conference representative in the Sugar Bowl.
Bonagura also saw good things for Baylor, predicting that the Bears would earn a berth in the Orange Bowl opposite the Pittsburgh Panthers. Schlabach had a different view, projecting North Carolina State (presumably the runner-up to Clemson in the ACC) and Notre Dame as the Orange Bowl matchup.
It’s all fun and fantasy up to now. On Saturday. the games begin for real for Oklahoma and the vast majority of the rest of college football