Earlier this summer, SEC officials announced that the conference would go to a nine-game conference football schedule beginning with the 2026 season, and as part of that schedule, Oklahoma and every other SEC team will have three permanent conference opponents they play every year while other conference opponents rotate.
The schedule reveal regarding the three permanent opponents that will become an annual part of each SEC school's conference schedule will be announced on Tuesday on the SEC Network.
SEC announcing permanent opponents
Ever since the SEC announcement came out about the expansion to a nine-game league schedule, there has been plenty of speculation about who the permanent opponents would be for every school and how that determination would be made.
In Oklahoma's case, the assumption has always been that the OU-Texas rivalry will be preserved and serve as one of the Sooners' three permanent opponents moving forward. After that, you can make a case that Missouri would be a natural fit with the Sooners because of longtime conference ties as members of the Big 12, as well as geographical proximity.
A similar argument could be made about Arkansas being one of Oklahoma's three permanent opponents. The Razorbacks and Sooners were founding members of the Southwest Conference (as were Texas and Texas A&M), and they have played each other a total of 15 times, but only three times in the last 50 years and not since 2001.
The quick thinking would have Texas, Missouri and Arkansas, or even Texas A&M, as the most logical choices for OU's three permanent opponents, but it appears that logic is but one of multiple criteria that are factoring into how all of this ultimately gets sorted out.
On the "Dari Nowkhah Show" on The Ref earlier this week, Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione confirmed that Texas definitely is one of the three teams the Sooners will play every season. That we do know, he said. At the time this interview aired on Tuesday morning, he said he knew who the second team was because they had reached out to him about future scheduling, "but the third team remains a mystery," he said. He did insinuate, however, that it would not be the trio of Texas, Missouri and Arkansas.
If you were reading between the lines of what the OU athletic director was suggesting in the interview, it would seem that one of the two latter schools is, in fact, part of the mix for the Sooners, but not both.
My belief is that Missouri is the second team, and that Arkansas and Texas A&M are off the list. So, who will the third team be when all is revealed on Tuesday?
When you look at the other 11 SEC teams that could be in play, and the fact that conference officials are interested in forming new rivalries in addition to continuing older ones, it leads me to believe that the third team Oklahoma will play every season beginning in 2026 is either LSU or Florida. The Sooners have played a total of five games combined against those two teams and all five have been in postseason play.
The schedule revision that is being discussed and finalized calls for a review of the three permanent opponents every four years.
The move to a nine-game schedule reduces the number of nonconference games to three, which is how three of the four Power Four conferences are already structured. The ACC is the only Power Four league that after this season will continue to play an eight-game conference schedule.
The SEC will also require every team in the conference to schedule at least one Power Four team as one of the nonconference games. The Sooners are scheduled out for the next five years with Power Four nonconference opponents: Michigan (2026), SMU (2027), Temple/Houston (2028), Nebraska (2029) and Nebraska/Tulsa (2030).
As the SEC and other conferences have expanded and restructured in recent years, it has become difficult to come up with a format that preserved natural rivalries and still allowed every school to play each other over a certain period of time. The new expanded format will allow every team to have a road trip to every SEC school over a four-year cycle. At the same time, it will allow the preservation of some of the more time-honored rivalries as well as the establishment of new ones.
During Tuesday's announcement on the SEC Network, studio hosts will discuss the new scheduling format and explain the thinking that went into the selection of the permanent opponents for each team.
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