Unbalanced schedule has Sooners swimming upstream against SEC's top tier

Oklahoma has never shied away from playing good teams in big-game environments. And the Sooners have won a big percentage of those games. Now they are in a conference packed with good teams that rank among the very best in the country.

The Sooners will play their first SEC conference game this weekend, facing No. 6-ranked Tennessee, one of five SEC teams currently ranked in the Associated Press top10 that OU will go up against in its eight-game conference schedule this season.

The schedule maker clearly didn't do Oklahoma any favors in setting up the Sooners' inaugural SEC season, and that is a prime factor in why college football experts have projected Oklahoma will have an uncharacteristic so-so season by historic OU standards, and a rude welcome to its new conference.

While the Sooners have been one of the most successful college football programs over the past 75 years (most wins of any college team since the end of World War II), none of that has a bearing on the 2024 season and a slate of games that may the most difficult in Oklahoma's 131 seasons of varsity football.

And for Oklahoma, this scheduling problem is not just a one-year scenario, it is a situation that the Sooners are going to have to live with for two seasons. The only thing that changes in 2025 is where the game is played. The teams remain the same in 2025, but the road teams from 2024 become the home teams next season.

According to the ESPN College Football Power Index, Oklahoma has second-hardest remaining 2024 schedule of the 134 FBS teams. For the balance of the season, the Sooners will play Tennessee this weekend, followed by Auburn, South Carolona, Ole Miss, Missouri, Alabama and LSU, plus the annual Red River Rivalry game with Texas, currently the top-ranked team in the country, according to the AP poll.

Out of that lineup, only Auburn and South Carolina are not ranked. Tennessee, Ole Miss, Missouri and Alabama are all ranked in the top seven and LSU is ranked No. 16.

The Sooners were picked to finish eighth in the SEC preseason media poll. Georgia is the only one of the seven teams projected to finish ahead of OU that is not on the Oklahoma schedule this year and next.

On one of his recent podcasts, FOX college football analyst Joel Klatt commented on the giant disparity that exists in this season's SEC schedule and how its has victimized the Sooners unfairly in comparison to the top teams in that conference.

"If your Brent Venables and anyone from OU," Klatt said, "how do you look at your schedule and then look at Missouri's schedule (for example), and you're like, 'time out.'"

"Are we in the same league? What's going on? They're (Missouri) not in the same hemisphere. One might as well be a Group of Five schedule (Mizzou's) versus an NFL schedule (Oklahoma's)."

- Joel Klatt, FOX CFB analyst

And Missouri isn't the only one of the teams ranked ahead of the Sooners with a schedule that is like night-and-day different than OU's. The Tigers face only Alabama among the upper-crust teams (within the top seven, or above No. 8 Oklahoma) in the SEC. Texas, Oklahoma's longtime rival, has only one SEC game considered to be difficult, Georgia, the week after the game with the Sooners in Dallas.

Ole Miss, Tennessee and LSU, all have just two games against teams ranked in the top seven in the SEC preseason poll, contrasted with six for Oklahoma.

Most college football analysts predict the the Sooners are going to have great difficulty navigating the schedule in front of them. And I can't argue with them. But we won't know until the games are actually played.

One thing we do know, however: If OU somehow is able to get through that killer schedule with as many as five wins, the Sooners should have a legitimate claim on one of the seven at-large spots in this year's College Football Playoff.