Coaches Poll kinder to Sooners than the CBS Sports preseason top-25 ranking

The closer we come to official kickoff of the 2024 Oklahoma football season, the more it seems the Sooners are slipping downward in the preseason top-25 rankings.

The first installment of the 2024 Coaches Poll came out on Monday and slotted OU in the No. 16 position. Taken by itself, that's not so bad, but the bigger and more frustrating picture for Sooner fans is that seven other SEC teams are ranked ahead of Brent Venables and crew. Simple math tells me that the team considered the 16th best team in the country to begin the new season is only the eighth best team in its own conference.

Welcome to the new world order of superconferences. Fifteen of the teams in the Coaches Poll Top 25 are from either the SEC (9) or the Big Ten (6).

What is interesting about this downward trend is that there should be a clearer and more favorable picture now of Oklahoma's prospects for the coming season than was the case back in January and post-spring when most of the early top-25 projections had the Sooners several spots higher.

For example, back in January, less than 24 hours after Michigan won the College Football Playoff and the national championship, Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports posted an article with a way-too-early top-25 projection for the 2024 college season. Oklahoma was No. 11 in that ranking.

A couple of months later, at the beginning of spring practice for most college teams, CBS Sports issued a revised top-25 projection for the 2024 season. OU dropped a couple of spots in that version to No. 13.

Now for the real kick in the head if you're a diehard Sooner football fan -- or a fan of any OU athletics team, for that matter: Oklahoma is now down to the No. 18 position in the CBS Sports Preseason 134, a ranking of all 134 FBS teams.

CBS Sports apparently has more concerns about the Sooner football team now than back in January. This certainly is counter to everything I've been hearing and reading about the team and what several of my peers have been observing in fall practice.

The only way to know for sure is to actually play the games. As Brent Venables said during SEC Media Days last month, "I think you have to go through it. Going through it gives you the best litmus test."

Let the games begin...