The Oklahoma Sooners made it to the College Football Playoff in 2025, but the 2026 season brings a roster that has changed in many ways, and new challenges for the 132nd OU football team that wants to return to the CFP.
With spring practices underway across the country, ESPN’s Bill Connelly released his initial SP+ rankings for all 138 teams at the FBS level heading into the 2026 season. Connelly discussed how SP+ is used, as he is the architect of the metric.
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“As a reminder, SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking. Along those same lines, these projections aren’t intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather.” – Bill Connelly, ESPN.
In the new rankings, Oklahoma ranked 12th overall on Connelly’s list. That mark is good for sixth-best in the SEC. In fact, the conference has the best overall average rating by conference, and both the best offense and defense rating by conference.
OU’s SP+ rating is 17.2, with the special teams at 0.4 (33rd nationally), the defense at 14.7 (10th nationally), and the offense at 31.6 (27th nationally).
With the special teams unit almost entirely intact from last season, and 100 percent of the production returning, the Sooners should be strong there again.
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Defensively, the Sooners lost a lot, but they also brought back a lot, and with Brent Venables again calling the shots, the expectation now in Norman is that the defense will always be something that can be leaned on.
On offense, Oklahoma feels like they got better this offseason, and returning stability and incoming help should help the overall unit take another step forward in 2026, after bottoming out in 2024.
As the Sooners look to return to the playoff, the schedule will once again be daunting. Eight of OU’s 12 regular-season opponents rank inside the top 24 of the SP+ rankings. Michigan (14th), Georgia (4th), Texas (6th), South Carolina (24th), Florida (19th), Ole Miss (16th), Texas A&M (9th), and Missouri (20th) will make for a tough road back to the CFP for the Sooners. Only UTEP (129th), New Mexico (68th), Kentucky (53rd), and Mississippi State (52nd) should provide a bit of a reprieve for Venables’ squad.
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This article originally appeared on Sooners Wire: Where do the Sooners rank in ESPN’s SP+ rankings for 2026?
