Oklahoma football: Sooners make big jump in ESPN Football Power Index

While the two major national weekly polls (AP and the Coaches Poll) were not particularly impressed by the blowout Oklahoma football win over a not-very-good Arkansas State team, the Week 1 results reflected in the ESPN College Football Power Index tell a different story.

The Sooners moved up two spots in this week’s AP Top 25 (to No. 18) and Coaches Poll (17), but they are all the way up to No. 4 — one spot below Georgia and one above Lincoln Riley’s USC squad — in the ESPN FPI. That’s a movement of 7 spots over Oklahoma’s No. 11 ranking in the preseason version of the FPI.

There is an important distinction to be made between the more traditional weekly top-25 national rankings and ESPN’s Football Power Index. While the former is a retrospective measurement based on performance to date, the FPI, in the words of ESPN, is a prospective model of a “team’s strength that is meant to be the best predictor of a team’s performance going forward for the rest of the season.

The top-five teams in the FPI this week are Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Oklahoma and USC. The Sooners are the highest ranked Big 12 team, followed by Texas, down to No. 11 after a preseason FPI ranking of No. 5. UCF is No. 19 after destroying Kent State 56-6 in its season opener, and Kansas State, a 45-0 winner over Southeast Missouri State, is No. 25 this week.

The FPI projects Oklahoma’ s win total at 10.5 and now gives the Sooners the best chance of winning the Big 12. OU has a 48.4 chance of winning the Big 12 in the Sooners’ final season in the conference, according to the FPI. Texas is next at 30 percent, and reigning conference champion Kansas State is at 5.5 percent.

Also of note from this week’s ESPN power ranking, the FPI projects Oklahoma with a 35.1 percent chance of making the College Football Playoff. That is fourth best at this snapshot in time.