Oklahoma football: Who are Sooners’ 10 best players at midpoint of 2023 season?
By Chip Rouse
The season is only half over and Oklahoma football Team 129 has already equaled the number of wins the Sooners collected in all of the 2022 season.
It’s clear that this is a more balanced and much better team than the one a year ago in Brent Venables first season as head coach. Multiple reasons factor into that improvement. but the main ones are more confidence, better talent, greater depth and a full year getting comfortable in the new systems and culture introduced by Venables and his coaching staff.
It has all come together in a 6-0 record to start the season (the Sooners were 3-3 at this point last season), a top-five ranking in the Associated Press Top 25 and a good chance that OU will return to the Big 12 Championship game for the first time in three years.
This being a bye week and the midway point of the regular season, we thought it appropriate to identify and rank the 10 biggest contributors to Oklahoma’s dramatic turnaround in Year 2 of the Brent Venables era. Another way of looking at it, these are the 10 players, in ascending order of perceived importance, at this point of the season that the Sooners can least afford to lose.