The way a team can compete for a national championship in college football has changed this year. After ten years of the four-team College Football Playoff, we’ve arrived at the expansion season for the CFP, with a whopping twelve teams having a chance to play their way to a title.
For the Oklahoma Sooners, the standard has always been to compete for national championships. Regardless of what conference the program is in, what the postseason format loos like, or how good outsiders expect OU to be, winning is the expectation in Norman. That’s no different under head coach Brent Venables, who is committed to building an elite, winning program at Oklahoma.
With OU exiting the Big 12 in favor of the SEC, the 12-team Playoff certainly helps the Sooners’ case, now that they’re in a tougher conference. Despite that, most of the national media doesn’t think Oklahoma has what it takes to be in the title discussion this year. The SEC media picked the Sooners to finish eighth in the conference last week.
However, one national media member thinks that Oklahoma might be a little undervalued heading into 2024. ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit joined Pat McAfee on “The Pat McAfee Show” to discuss the upcoming college football season. Herbstreit was asked which team could be a “sleeper” pick to make the Playoff this year.
“I’ll say Oklahoma if you’re talking like as a stretch,” Herbstreit said. “I think people are sleeping a little bit on Oklahoma because there’s so much talk about them going, ‘You’ll see what it’s like in the SEC, Oklahoma. Good luck.’ They’ve got a really young quarterback that they’re high on (Jackson Arnold), playing in their bowl game last year. I like Coach V, and I think he creates toughness in a football team.”
Venables has been hyper-fixated on bringing toughness back to Oklahoma football, so Herbstreit is on the money with that part of his assessment. One of the most-respected voices in college football media doesn’t think that OU will have as many problems in the SEC as other media members do.
Certainly the SEC will be a tremendous challenge every single week, and it may take time for results to show, but Venables has been tirelessly building up the Oklahoma program since he arrived on December 5th, 2021. He’s been trying to get the program ready to compete in their new conference this year, and more importantly, in the years to come. A Playoff appearance this year would go a long way towards making a loud statement to the national media that the Sooners are back near the top of the sport, after a short time away.
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