Oklahoma football is still a large unknown among many college football experts regarding how good or improved the Sooners might be in 2025 after fashioning a disappointing 6-7 record in their first season in the powerhouse SEC.
National analysts like SEC Network's Paul Finebaum and ESPN's Greg McElroy have gone on record in recent weeks saying they believe the Sooners could be poised for a breakout season this fall. Quite a few others, however, although they may readily acknowledge OU has made some major offseason moves to upgrade talent and change the trajectory, are more in a wait-and-see mode before jumping on the Sooner hype train for the coming season.
Multiple outlets include Sooners in way-too-early top 25
With the addition in December of Ben Arbuckle as offensive coordinator and the announcement shortly thereafter that John Mateer, the quarterback at Washington State last season under Arbuckle, transferred and followed his OC to Norman, Oklahoma, things immediately began to look up for an Oklahoma offense that uncharacteristically was among the worst in college football last season.
Mateer was considered the top quarterback prospect when he entered the portal after last season, where he was the field general for the nation's sixth-best scoring offense in 2024 and 17th-best in total offense.
Those two offseason moves by themselves were enough to provide OU enough of a positive boost that several national media outlets that published way-too-early top-25 projections for the 2025 season included the Sooners, albeit at the tail end in the 23-25 range.
Then, this spring, the Sooners added five more players from the transfer portal, including Jaydn Ott, who was the No. 1 running back available.
Not all of the way-too-early top-25 media projections back in January had Oklahoma ranked among the 25 best college teams for the 2025 season.
Now that all of the schools have completed their spring practice schedules, we are starting to see post-spring updates to the way-too-early top-25 rankings first issued right after completion of the 2024 college football season.
Two of note, Sporting News and USA Today, did not include Oklahoma in their initial way-too-early top-25 rankings.
This week, though, Sporting News issued a post-spring update to its top 25 college football rankings for the 2025 season. The Sooners are now No. 24 in the Sporting News' way-too-early top 25.
USA Today's first-of-the-year, too-early forecast of the top-25 teams for 2025 also excluded Oklahoma in its opening salvo in January. The publication's sports group put out a spring revision to its earlier college football top-25 projection and had OU sitting in the No. 25 spot, but with the caveat that the Sooners need to upgrade the offensive line performance and get better production out of the wide receiver corps.
All of this, of course, means little to nothing until the games get played in the fall, but it does make for intriguing media reporting and talk-show debate that will continue to accelerate through the summer months. It is becoming more and more apparent, however, that anything outside of a top-25 ranking for Oklahoma this coming season will not sit well among the Sooner faithful and could easily end Brent Venables' time at OU.
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