ESPN ranks all 134 FBS football teams in defining tiers; what tier do Sooners fall in?

One of the things the ESPN college football staff likes to do every year is rank all 134 FBS teams and organize the grouping in tiers like "top four," "on the title doorstep," and "who needs a quarterback, anyway?"

"We dug into a host of in-depth metrics," writes David Hale in an article posted on ESPN+, "from the old-fashioned top-25s to the new-fangled analytics such as SP+ and FPI -- and used that date to group similar teams together, then rank those groups."

The top 34 teams in ESPN's ranking for the coming season fall into seven different tiers. The top four teams, or the "Fantastic Four" as they are categorized -- Georgia, Ohio State, Oregon and Texas --should be no surprise to anybody. Then you have Tier 2, where four more teams are listed -- Alabama, Notre Dame, Ole Miss and Penn State -- under the heading "Wait, what's Alabama doing here?"

You have to go down eight more teams and a couple more tiers before you come to the grouping that Oklahoma falls in. The Sooners are among six teams (three from the SEC and three from the Big 12) that fall under the Tier 4 heading "A playoff berth or 7-5 is equally possible." The six teams are Arizona, Kansas State, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah.

Consider Oklahoma's 2023 season," writes ESPN's Hale. "A 10-win season. A win over a playoff team. One loss came on a touchdown with less than a minute to play. The other, by three, when the offense was stuffed on a fourth-down try at midfield. Now consider that Oklahoma returns 86 percent of its defensive snaps and will feature a former five-star recruit at QB.

"Why is it exactly," Hale continues, "that so many folks think Oklahoma is in for a tough transition to the SEC?"

Nine SEC teams are listed among the top 23 teams in the ESPN ranking, including seven ranked higher than the Sooners, and fall into the top-five tiers. That seems to be the universal answer to the question about Oklahoma posed by Hale.