Offensive continuity and explosiveness has been an historical strength of the Oklahoma football brand, particularly so in recent seasons when the Sooner offense was led by two Heisman winning quarterbacks, a Heisman runner-up, not to mention a fourth Heisman winner who began his college career at Oklahoma.
And it wasn’t just the quarterback play that made the Oklahoma offenses such a powerful attacking force. The Sooner quarterbacks, while incredibly gifted in their own right, were surrounded by elite talent at all the skill positions and with an offensive line second to none.
That makes for a lot of wins, even with a much-maligned defense that was among the most inept in all of college football. Between 2016 and 202, the Sooners fashioned a cumulative record of 67-12 that included three 12-win seasons, 2 with 11 wins and one 9-win season, which was shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last season, in Brent Venables first as the 22nd head coach in OU football history, the Sooners won just six of 13 games and were worse in the Big 12, finishing with a 3-6 conference record, including two losses by an average of 40 points.
It’s safe to say that the 2022 Oklahoma defense had not gotten better, despite having a head coach who was one of the top defensive coordinators in college football and may have been one of the poorest in recent Sooner football memory. And, statistically, last season, the once vaunted OU offense slipped back a notch or two.
Earlier in the spring, the ESPN college football staff came out with its annual Future Power Rankings for the sport’s most important position: quarterback. It is important to understand that the ESPN future rankings looks out three years to produce, in this case, a ranking of what it believes are the top 25 teams at the quarterback position covering the 2023, 2024 and 2025 seasons.
Oklahoma, with fifth-year veteran Dillon Gabriel manning the quarterback spot in the 2023 season and with Jackson Arnold, the top dual-threat QB and No. 3 overall recruit in the 2023 class, according to ESPN, the presumptive favorite to take over the starting position for the Sooners in 2024 and ’25, Oklahoma was ranked No. 3 in ESPN’s future quarterback rankings. That was an improvement of four spots over what it was a year ago, which was Gabriel’s and head coach Venables’ first seasons at OU.
This past week, ESPN raised the stakes a little and published its Future Power Rankings for the top-25 offenses in college football spanning the next three seasons.
Ranked No. 3 in ESPN’s Future Power Rankings for quarterback, you would expect Oklahoma to fare pretty well in projecting how college football offenses will perform looking out the next three years.
While the Sooners moved up, though, in the 2023 ESPN Future Power Rankings for quarterbacks, they fell back a spot in the year-over-year rankings for offensive units. OU ranked 6th a year ago, projecting out three years for college football offenses, but came in 7th for the period 2023-25.
With concerns surrounding the OU running backs now that leading rusher Eric Gray is off to the NFL and the injury to the Sooners second-leading rusher last season Jovantae Barnes, plus the loss of Marvin Mims and Theo Wease from the receiving corps, the fact that Oklahoma only dropped one position in the Future Power Rankings for offenses is probably a positive outlook.
Over the last five full seasons in college football, the Oklahoma offense has been prolific in comparison to other FBS teams. The Sooners were No. 1 in the country in both 2017 and 2018, averaging at least 570 yards per game. OU ranked third in total offense in 2019 (interestingly, the No. 2 team that year was UCF with Gabriel the quarterback and Jeff Lebby as offensive coordinator).
The last two seasons (2021 and 2022), the Oklahoma offense almost 100 yards per game less productive than in 2017-19, but the Sooners still ranked among the top-20 teams in the country.
It’s reasonable to assume that OU’s recent offensive history played a factor in the Sooners’ top-10 2023 Future Power Ranking. It may never again be as wide open and explosive as it was under offensive genius Lincoln Riley, but the offensive talent that Oklahoma is able to recruit, especially at the quarterback position, is too good for the Sooners not to remain a powerful offensive force in college football for the immediate future.