Sooners are a better team in 2024, but worse off being in SEC

Oklahoma and most every other team at the FBS level of college football are busy working through suffocating late summer heat in preparation for the kickoff of the 2024 season, which in the Sooners' case comes 26 days from now.

This season, of course, marks an historic milestone for Oklahoma football. After over a century making a home in a series of conference expansions that eventually morphed into the Big 12, the Sooners have pulled up stakes and taken their affiliation to the SEC, the league considered the aristocracy of major college football.

The Sooners won 14 conference championships in 28 seasons as members of the Big 12, including six consecutive titles between 2015 and 2020, but did not play for the conference championship in any of the last three seasons.

Two seasons ago, in Brent Venables first season at the helm of the Oklahoma program, the Sooners finished with a highly uncharacteristic losing record at 6-7. OU rebounded in Year 2 under Venables with a four-game improvement and a 10-win season at 10-3.

This year's Oklahoma team is expected to be even better than the 2023 Sooner team with better and deeper talent than the past two editions and a defense that could be even stronger than the somewhat expected high-powered OU offense that has been among the best in the country for a good part of the last 10 seasons.

The 2024 edition of Oklahoma football -- otherwise referred to as Team 130 in the lineage of the program -- appears to be the best team Oklahoma has put on the field since the successive College Football Playoff teams of 2017 through 2019.

And therein lies the paradox for this Sooner team as it gets set to begin a new era in its illustrious football history as a member of the SEC.

This is a significantly better Oklahoma team than it was three years ago and the trajectory is still heading upward, but in terms of the ultimate measure of success, wins and losses, the Sooners might be worse off because of both the quantity and quality of the competition that exists in the SEC. Every week will pose a serious challenge. As an example, six of the eight conference games on OU's 2024 schedule features a team that will begin the season ranked in the top 25 nationally. The Sooners might have two or three games like that in the Big 12.

Stewart Mandel of The Athletic recently posted an article examining which teams are better off, worse off, or unaffected by the latest wave of conference realignment.

While the main motivation for a team moving to a different conference is money, Mandel writes, "the fans themselves aren't seeing a dime of it. Their lone concern is whether their team wins on Saturday -- and more money hardly guarantees more victories."

Mandel looked at all of the teams in the four remaining power conferences and assigned a score ranging from positive-5 to minus-5 based on the team's ability to win in that conference. A score of plus-1 to plus-5 to represents mildly better to far better, while the range of minus-1 to minus-5 represents the exact opposite and a place no team on the move wishes to find itself.

Sooner fans are not going to be happy hearing this, but looking specifically at the SEC, Mandel gave Oklahoma a score of minus-3. That was tied with four other SEC teams (Kentucky, Mississippi State and South Carolina). Vanderbilt received the lowest score (-4). Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas A&M all scored in negative numbers. Tennessee was status quo with a score of "0."

With a score of plus-4, Georgia and Alabama were viewed by Mandel as benefiting the most by the recent realignment within the SEC. LSU and Texas each scored plus-3 and Florida and Ole Miss were plus-2.

"From 1938 to 2021, the Sooners claimed a Big 8/Big 12 championship in 47 of 83 seasons," Mandel wrote in the accompanying text about Oklahoma. "No major program in the country has more league titles. Realistically, OU will not come close to enjoying that level of dominance in the SEC."

While it is true that Oklahoma's road to an eighth national championship will be considerably more difficult as a member of the SEC, the path to the College Football Playoff may be easier because of the SEC as long as the Sooners are able to put together enough wins.