USA Today was the latest media outlet to offer its assessment of where Oklahoma stands in relation to the best teams in the country and a good part of the SEC to begin the 2025 college football season.
USA Today Sports issued what it called its 1-136 2025 college football preseason re-rank, which included revisions to the publication's post-spring preseason ranking in May. Oklahoma was definitely one of the teams that benefited from the revised assessment as new information and evaluations became available over the summer.
The Sooners were ranked No. 11 in the revamped USA Today rankings. That's a jump of 14 spots from No. 25 back in the spring, and further testament that those who cover college football for a living are buying into the improvements and adjustments head coach Brent Venables and his staff have made during the offseason.
Sooners climb into top 15 of 136-team rankings
USA Today is one of five national media outlets that have issued 1-136 rankings in recent weeks of all the teams that make up the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) level of college football. The others were Sporting News, College Football News, CBS Sports and FOX Sports. The ranking for Oklahoma among those four other national outlets ranges from a high of 10 by FOX Sports to a low of 24 by CBS Sports. In between, the Sporting News ranked the Sooners 21st and College Football News had them 13th.
Not only did none of the five national outlets agree on where Oklahoma should be ranked heading into the 2025 season, but none agreed on what the top three teams are: USA Today (Penn State/Georgia/Clemson), Sporting News (Texas/Ohio State/Penn State), College Football News (Penn State/Texas/Alabama), CBS Sports (Texas/Penn State/Ohio State), FOX Sports (Texas/Ohio State/Oregon).
The uplifting takeaway for Sooner fans from the USA Today 1-136 re-rank is that only four other SEC teams were ranked ahead of OU: No. 2 Georgia, No. 4 Texas, No. 7 Alabama and No. 10 LSU. The Sooners play three of the four this season.
As has been the case all along in the myriad of 2025 rankings that have been issued since the last college football game was played, the SEC and Big Ten have dominated the top-25 teams. In the USA Today re-rank alone, 10 of the top-25 teams are from the SEC and seven are out of the Big Ten.
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