Where will Oklahoma be when the Associated Press 2024 Preseason Top 25 comes out?

You know the new college football season is getting close when the Associated Press comes out with its preseason top 25 around the second week in August. The consensus leading up to this point is that the 2024 edition of Oklahoma football will begin its inaugural season in the SEC somewhere around the middle of the second ten.

Since the end of the 2023 college football season in early January, there have been a couple dozen way-too-early, post-spring and preseason forecasts of what the top 25 will look like to begin the new season, a season in which at least 10 schools have moved to different power conferences.

Oklahoma and Texas sparked the recent round of conference realignment by announcing a couple of years ago that they were leaving the Big 12 to become members of the SEC. That became official this summer along with similar moves by USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten and Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado switching allegiance from the now decimated Pac-12 to the Big 12.

Essentially what we now have in college football are two superconferences, or the Power Two, with the domination of the SEC and Big Ten reflected in the number of schools from those two conferences that are included in the country's top-25 teams.

Sporting News recently put together a composite preseason top 25 blending the most recent rankings by seven national media sources (247Sports, The Athletic, Athlon, CBS Sports, ESPN, Sports Illustrated and USA Today). 247Sports did something similar consolidating eight media sources.

Oklahoma ranged from No. 8 (ESPN) to No. 19 in the various preseason top-25 rankings. 247Sports had the Sooners 14th in its cumulative 2024 top-25 rankings; OU was 16th in the Sporting News composite rankings.

Seven SEC teams ranked ahead of OU and four Big Ten teams in the Sporting News top-25 composite. Six SEC teams and four from the Big Ten were ranked higher than the Sooners in the 247Sports combined rankings.

All of these preseason top-25 projections are fun for sports-talk conversation and debate, but the two preeminent sources that college fans look forward to every August are about to reveal their picks for the top 25 college teams to start the 2024 season.

The Associated Press media poll is scheduled for release on Aug. 12. The Coaches Poll Top 25 will follow shortly thereafter, if not before. My best guess is the Sooners will fall somewhere between 14 and 16 in both polls. The bigger question is: Will OU be working its way up or down from there, and where will the Sooners be at season's end?