Oklahoma and Nebraska may not have to wait until 2029 to renew their legendary football rivalry.
Entering the third week of the 2025 college football season, USA Today Sports predicted Oklahoma and Nebraska meeting this season in the ReliaQuest Bowl in Tampa, Florida, in an SEC-Big Ten matchup.
USA Today Sports predicts Sooners and Nebraska in bowl game
Both teams are 2-0 in the young 2025 season. The Cornhuskers are coming off a dominant 68-0 victory over Akron out of the Mid-American Conference last weekend. Meanwhile, Oklahoma defeated Michigan 24-13 in a matchup of top-20 teams and the marquee game in Week 2 of the college season.
Oklahoma-Nebraska was one of the classic college football rivalries in the 1970s and '80s, but the rivalry dates back much further than all the epic showdowns between Sooners head coach Barry Switzer and Tom Osborne of Nebraska.
Perhaps the most classic game in the long history of the rivalry took place in 1971. Billed as the "Game of the Century," the two teams entered the game as the top two teams in the country. The contest was a back-and-forth affair and went down to the very end with top-ranked Nebraska winning 34-31.
The series between the Sooners and Cornhuskers spans a total of 88 games, dating back to the inaugural meeting in 1912. Oklahoma was not affiliated with a conference at the time of the first game between the two schools, while Nebraska was a founding member of what become the Missouri Valley Conference.
Nebraska prevailed in that opening game 13-9 and won or tied 15 of the first 17 games played between the two teams. In the 71 games since then, however, the Sooners have gone 44-25-1 against their longtime conference rivals, including a 16-game win streak from 1943-58 and eight wins in the 10 games played since 2000.
When the Big 12 was formed, Oklahoma and Nebraska were assigned to different divisions and what had been an annual rivalry series between the two schools became home and home twice every four years. And when Nebraska left the Big 12 for the Big Ten after the 2010 season, one of the great rivalries in college football history effectively came to an end. Oklahoma and Nebraska have met two times since then, however, as nonconference opponents in 2021 and '22, with the Sooners winning both games, 23-16 in Norman in 2021 and 49-14 in Lincoln the following year.
OU and Nebraska are scheduled to play again in a home-and-home series in 2029 and 2030.
Oklahoma, of course, has higher aspirations this season than the ReliaQuest Bowl (formerly known as the Outback Bowl), but it would be an upgrade over the Armed Forces Bowl, which is where the Sooners ended up last season, losing to Navy while making their 26th consecutive postseason bowl appearance. Last season in the ReliaQuest Bowl, Michigan upset Alabama.
While the likelihood of this rivalry renewal in the 2025 postseason is extremely low, it is intriguing to contemplate and would be a bowl matchup that fans of both Oklahoma and Nebraska would easily welcome.
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