The Oklahoma Sooners watched the rest of the college football world in action in Week 12, as they were on their second and final bye week of the 2024 regular season.
OU’s record sits at 5-5 and just 1-5 in SEC play, a disappointing mark for a program that is used to winning and winning big. In the third season under head coach Brent Venables, it’s been a rough go of things in Norman in Year 1 in a new league.
But in at least one metric, Oklahoma may not be as bad as their record indicates. ESPN college football writer Bill Connelly released his weekly SP+ rankings (ESPN+)for all 134 teams at the FBS level.
Connelly defines SP+ as a tempo-and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency, intended to be predictive and forward-facing. It is not a résumé ranking, and is simply a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football.
While the Sooners are far from sniffing the actual Top 25 and are a long shot to making a bowl game for the first time in 25 years, SP+ has them ranked all the way up at No. 27, sandwiched in between Colorado and Virginia Tech.
One saving grace of OU’s poor season, and the most likely reason for the top-30 ranking, is that they’ve played a very difficult schedule. Tulane is one of the best teams in the Group of Five, and Oklahoma beat them by 15 points. South Carolina is far better than anyone expected, and teams like Tennessee, Texas, Ole Miss, and Missouri have all had their moments in 2024.
Unfortunately, the schedule doesn’t get any easier, as Alabama comes to town on Saturday, and Oklahoma will face LSU on the road a week after that. The Sooners will have to win at least one of those matchups if they want to avoid missing a bowl game for the first time since 1998.
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