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How does Oklahoma football fare on the national popularity scale?

By Chip Rouse

Dec 1, 2018; Atlanta, GA, USA; A general view of the SEC logo prior to the game against the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs during the SEC championship game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports
Dec 1, 2018; Atlanta, GA, USA; A general view of the SEC logo prior to the game against the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs during the SEC championship game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports /
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Fans of the Big 12 won’t like hearing this, but Texas and Oklahoma football are the two most popular brands, not to mention revenue producers, in the conference.

After this season, however, the Sooners and Longhorns are leaving the Big 12 to join the best and most popular football conference in college football. The Southeastern Conference is loaded with big names and, like it or not, some of the most popular teams in the country.

Both teams have large and highly passionate fan bases with wide geographic reach. They also have enjoyed grand success at the national level. But Oklahoma and its longtime rival Texas are going into a league overflowing in popularity and passion. Oh, and by the way, since Texas’ national championship 2005 season, a team from the SEC has won 13 of the last 17 national titles, including the last four.

If that’s not dominating enough, in three of the four seasons during that span that an SEC team did not win the national championship, a team from that conference was the opponent in the title game.

That’s the conference the Sooners and Longhorns are joining beginning in the 2024 season. Life as those two teams and their fans have known it is about to undergo dramatic change. Their play on the field will ultimately determine how they stack up in the SEC standings and national rankings, but the brand equity Oklahoma has built up over the years at the national level is very much SEC worthy and fits in perfectly among the most popular of SEC teams.

SEC media rights holder ESPN is keenly aware of the pervasive popularity reach of Oklahoma and Texas football, and you can bet that was a plus for the SEC in securing its new media rights deal with the cable network.

Sooners Wire, a sports website dedicated to OU athletics and affiliated with the USA Today network, recently reported on a marketing research project performed by a group named SBRnet and analyzed by AI.com that examined the popularity of future SEC teams in comparison to other big-name college football programs nationwide.

Not surprisingly, Alabama and Georgia were ranked one and two, respectively as the two most popular SEC teams. Both of those schools also rank high on the national scale (Nos. 6 and 7, respectively) and have fan bases estimated at greater than three million, according to the research. Multiple national championships in recent years will do that for you.

LSU, Texas and Texas A&M were next in line followed by Oklahoma at No. 6. The popularity of Sooner football ranked 18th nationally, according to the SBRnet research, with an estimated fan base of 1.6 million and continues to steadily grow despite the disappointing 2022 downturn.

As the staff at Sooners Wire reported, because of the wide popularity of both Oklahoma and Texas, it’s easy to see why the addition of the Sooners and Longhorns to the SEC was a win-win arrangement, benefiting both the SEC as well as the two schools.

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