Oklahoma football: Brent McMurphy projects OU in Texas Bowl in 2023
By Chip Rouse
Count Brett McMurphy of the Action Network among those who don’t think Oklahoma football will be much better in 2023 than it was in Brent Venables first season as OU head coach.
That is certainly not a ringing endorsement for a team that finished with a losing season in 2022, something akin to blasphemy in Sooner football history. We’ve seen cases made both pro and con regarding what kind of football team will emerge in Norman in Year 2 of the Venables era.
The net-net is that no one is really sure of what to expect from OU in the coming season, although offseason reports and highly touted talent additions on the recruiting and transfer trails, particularly on defensive side, suggest that the Sooners should win eight or nine and even 10 games in 2023. That would be a major improvement, although it is important to keep in mind that five of Oklahoma’s seven losses last season were by seven or fewer points, and in four of those games the losing margin was just three points.
McMurphy this week joined the sports pundits and prognosticators who are busy every offseason projecting how the next college football season will play out. Only instead of projecting top-25 teams or conference races, McMurphy has forecast how the 2023 postseason bowl assignments will sort out, citing his 95 percent accuracy rate in placing 78 of 82 teams in the correct bowl when undertaking this project for last season.
McMurphy has Oklahoma going to the TaxAct Texas Bowl in Houston, where he has the Sooners matched up against future SEC foe Mississippi State. The Texas Bowl is fourth in the Big 12’s postseason bowl rotation, or fifth if a Big 12 team is one of the four teams that makes it into this season’s College Football Playoff. In 2024, the playoff field expands to 12 teams.
According to McMurphy’s bowl allocations, Texas Tech will finish as the highest-ranked Big 12 team and will earn a spot in the Goodyear Cotton Bowl to face Alabama, and he has the Crimson Tide as only a four-point favorite, which may speak to the feasibility of such a projection.
Texas is projected to play in the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio against Lincoln Riley’s USC Trojans, and McMurphy has the Longhorns as nearly a touchdown favorite (-6.5). He expects Kansas State also to get a better bowl assignment than the Sooners, playing in the inaugural Pop Tarts Bowl in Orlando and going up against favored North Carolina as a 7.5-point underdog.
Oklahoma was also the No. 4 Big 12 team assigned to a postseason bowl last season, although the Sooners finished with the seventh-best record in the conference. Oklahoma’s historic drawing power most certainly had a hand in the higher bowl placement.
A number of the 2023 college football projections have the Sooners finishing as high as second or third in the Big 12 in their final season in the conference. That would clearly change things in terms of where OU would fall in the Big 12 bowl allocation process.
But Brent Venables’ Sooners are going to have to prove it on the field first. Until then, any improvement over last season will remain suspect. And that apparently is where McMurphy has landed on Oklahoma’s prospects for the 2023 season.