SEC Media Days 2025 have come to an end. A busy week in Atlanta served as the unofficial start for the season, with Week 1 six short weeks and a fall camp away on the calendar.
The Oklahoma Sooners are eager to make up for last year’s disappointing performance, and they’ve made numerous changes this offseason to ensure that the 2024 season never repeats itself. However, it doesn’t appear that many in SEC circles believe it’ll make a difference.
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The league released its annual SEC Preseason Media Poll, with the predicted order of finish, offering a lot of insight into what the media thinks about each team heading into the year. OU was picked to finish in 10th place in the conference by the media, although they received three votes for SEC Champion. In the poll, the Sooners are sandwiched between Tennessee and Auburn.
Oklahoma will play six of the top nine teams in the projected standings in Texas, Alabama, LSU, South Carolina, Ole Miss, and Tennessee. OU’s entire conference schedule (eight games) includes teams in the top twelve, with Auburn and Missouri rounding things out. For comparison, Texas plays four of the top twelve teams in the poll. Of the bottom seven teams in the conference, Auburn and Missouri are the only ones OU will see in 2025.
On the other hand, Texas was picked to win the SEC this year. The Longhorns play just three of the top nine projected teams in Georgia, Florida, and Texas A&M. Their conference schedule sees the Longhorns play just one team in the top four, while OU faces three. The ‘Horns play five of the bottom seven teams in the standings (including Oklahoma), and they face all four of the teams who got the least votes in Vanderbilt, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi State. All schedules are the same as they were in 2024, just with host teams flipped in 2025.
That kind of scheduling inequality from the SEC is what has helped Texas leap back to the top of college football after almost a decade and a half of mediocrity, and it has helped push the Sooners down after a quarter-century of high-level football in Norman. The two Red River rivals entered the SEC at the same time, but they didn’t enter into the same arena when it came to opposition. As a result, the Longhorns have been projected to win the conference, partially on the back of a laughably easy conference schedule again, while Oklahoma is picked to finish 10th with one of the more difficult schedules in the nation again.
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The Sooners addressed the gauntlet of a schedule and the overall expectations of playing at OU multiple times at SEC media days. Oklahoma has never been a program that backs down from a fight, and they’ll have plenty on their hands in 2025. Let’s see if Brent Venables and his team can prove the SEC media wrong this season.
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This article originally appeared on Sooners Wire: Sooners projected to finish 10th in the conference after media days
