The final national rankings are in for the 2023 Oklahoma football season. The Sooners finished No. 12 in the three major human polls.
Immediately after the conference championship games were completed, the College Football Playoff rankings were issued as well as the final top-25 rankings for both the Associated Press and Coaches Poll.
Any final top-25 rankings published after Monday's CFP championship will probably have the Sooners lower than No. 12 as a result of their Alamo Bowl loss to Arizona, but that game has already been taken into account in ESPN's College Football Power Index for the 2023 season.
With one game remaining in the 2023 college football season -- the national championship game between No. 1 Michigan and No. 2 Washington -- ESPN has published its penultimate edition of the 2023 College Football Power Index. The final FPI will come out after the national championship.
Unlike the human polls, which are subjective in nature and retrospective based on a team's resume and the eye test, the FPI is prospective and an objective measure meant to be a predictor of a team's performance going forward throughout the college football season.
The Sooners are No. 9 in the latest FPI, and that is actually down one position, presumably taking into account OU's 38-24 loss to Arizona, which ironically ranks 20th in the same computer model.
Another ESPN computer model, SP+, which is described as "an opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency and a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football," has a different year-end evaluation of Oklahoma's 2023 season. The SP+ ranking has the Sooners 17th, but still higher than Arizona (18) but lower both Texas (6) and Kansas State (14) out of the Big 12.