Oklahoma football: Ranking the five most difficult OU games in 2023
By Chip Rouse
Most college football experts agree that the 2023 Oklahoma football schedule is one of the easiest among Power Five teams and highly favorable to a Sooner turnaround this season.
Phil Steele’s 2023 College Football Preview ranks OU’s 2023 schedule, which kicks off the Saturday after next (Sept. 2), as the 49th toughest entering the new season. Ten Big 12 teams are perceived to have more difficult schedules than the Sooners, who are embarking on their final season in that conference before moving over to the much tougher SEC.
For the first time in many a moon, Oklahoma will not play a Power Five team in the nonconference portion of its schedule. This was not by design but rather the need to cancel a previously scheduled home-and-home series with Georgia that was originally set to kick off this coming season. Because of the Sooners’ impending move to the SEC, SEC officials directed Georgia and Tennessee to cancel future games with OU that had already been contracted.
As a result, instead of beginning the 2023 season at home against Arkansas State and Georgia and on the road in Week 3 at Tulsa, Oklahoma will host SMU at home instead of the top-ranked and two-time defending national champion Georgia Bulldogs.
Sources: The SEC has directed Georgia and Tennessee to not play their home-and-home non-conference series against Oklahoma. The Bulldogs had OU scheduled in '23 and '31. The Vols’ 2020 game in Norman was cancelled amid COVID and was expected to be made up down the line.
— Pete Thamel (@PeteThamel) September 14, 2022
Having Georgia on the schedule would have clearly altered the Sooners’ strength of schedule this season.
But as Brent Venables says, you can only play the teams that are on your schedule, and while the Sooners may have what is perceived to be a softer schedule than other teams in the Big 12 and around the country, they still have some difficult games ahead of them. It will be far from a cakewalk for the Crimson and Cream.
As fate would have it, Oklahoma will play three of the four new teams that are joining the conference this season, but the Sooners do not have to play Kansas State, considered one of the Big 12 title contenders in 2023, Baylor or Texas Tech.
We’ve identified the five games on the 2023 Oklahoma schedule that will be the toughest stumbling blocks for the Sooners and ranked them from least challenging to most challenging:
5. TCU in Norman, Nov. 24
The Sooners are still smarting from the 55-24 smackdown suffered at the hands of the Horned Frogs a year ago. It also exposed OU’s lack of quarterback depth when Dillon Gabriel was injured late in the first half and missed the entire second half and all of the game the following week. Before last season, the Sooners had won eight straight games against TCU. OU leads the all-time series 17-6.
The Horned Frogs return only three starters on offense, but they return eight on defense. The TCU starters lost on offense include quarterback Max Duggan (replaced by former Sooner Chandler Morris), the top two running backs and the top three receivers. This game will be the final one of the regular season and will be played on the Friday after Thanksgiving, a date that was reserved for the OU-Nebraska rivalry for many years in the old Big Eight.