EA Sports confirms what OU fans already know: The 'Palace' is one of most difficult road venues in college football

The "Palace on the Prairie" is not a friendly environment for Oklahoma football opponents and over the years has given the Sooners a huge home-field advantage.

During the 1940s and '50s, when Bud Wilkinson's teams were putting OU football on the national map, visiting teams would call playing games at Oklahoma the Snake Pit.

In Bob Stoops' first 12 seasons as head coach at Oklahoma, the Sooners lost a total of three home games, and between 2005 and 2011, put together a program-record 39-game home winning streak.

Gaylord Family - Oklahoma Memorial Stadium isn't the largest in college football stadium and it's not the loudest in terms of crowd noise decibels, but it is frequently cited as one of the toughest places to play. And for a second year in a row EA Sports ranked the Palace on the Prairie as the eighth toughest place to play in the upcoming CFB26 video game.

Sooners get top-10 road environment in CFB26

According to EA Sports, the second edition of the highly popular video game will feature revamped home-field advantage feature that "hits harder, stretches deeper and feels more alive."

LSU's Tiger Stadium was rated the most difficult place for visiting teams to play, and two other SEC teams were included in the top five: No. 4 Georgia and No. 5 Alabama. Florida (No. 7) and Oklahoma were ranked in the top 10.

Ten SEC teams total -- Kyle Field at Texas A&M (11), Neyland Stadium at Tennessee (12), Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium (13), South Carolina's Williams-Brice Stadium (16), Jordan-Hare Stadium at Auburn (17) and Davis-Wade Stadium at Mississippi State -- were included in the top 25, the most of any conference.

The best teams in college football generally play their home games in the largest stadiums, a number of which hold over 100,000 vocal and highly partisan fans who generate a lot of noise that can be extremely disruptive to visiting teams. But there are more factors that contribute to a home-field advantage in football than simply stadium size and capacity.

Of the 10 SEC stadiums in EA's top 25 of the the toughest places to play, only Mississippi State (60,311) holds fewer fans than Oklahoma (86,112). Gaylord Family - Oklahoma Memorial Stadium is the ninth-largest stadium in the SEC and No. 13 in the country.

Georgia currently has the longest active home winning streak in college football at 31 games.

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