It was a very good week for Oklahoma.
The Sooners were easy to write off early in the 2016 season, after two bad losses in the first three weeks. Oklahoma failed to cover by 23 points against Houston (33-23 loss, as a 13-point favorite) and Ohio State (45-24, as a 2-point favorite), which appeared to knock them out of the national discussion.
But Houston did the Sooners a favor by knocking off Louisville on Thursday night, eliminating (for now) the Cardinals from the playoff picture. Houston recorded a single-game SRS score of 79.5 for that performance, the top game of the week. And the better Houston looks, the more forgivable that loss is from Oklahoma’s perspective.
Oklahoma also doubled-up on West Virginia, 56-28, the third-best game of the week. And the fourth-best game of the week came from Oklahoma State, who destroyed TCU. The Sooners and Cowboys face off in two weeks in a de facto Big 12 playoff game: the teams are 8-0 and 7-1 in conference play, respectively, with every other team having at least two conference losses.
Below are the single-game ratings from week twelve:
But the SRS doesn’t love Oklahoma as much as you might think. The Sooners still rank only 11th in the SRS, behind contenders like Washington, Wisconsin, and even Colorado. A two-loss Pac-12 champion in Colorado is certainly a threat to Oklahoma, and would add insult to injury if a former B12 team knocked the Sooners out of the playoffs. The Buffaloes are currently 6th in the SRS, and would add wins over Utah and Washington (or Washington State) to their resume if Colorado goes 11-2.
Below are the SRS ratings through week twelve:
So why doesn’t the SRS like OU?
Obviously the two losses hurt: they were to good teams, but they were otherwise bad losses. In addition, the 7-point win over Texas Tech and the 5-point win over Texas are pretty bad, too. Those teams rank 67th and 52nd in the SRS, respectively.
Colorado, like Oklahoma, lost bad to one of the Big 10 powerhouses. But in the Buffaloes’ defense, that game was at least on the road. And the loss to USC looks better than the loss to Houston.
The Buffaloes have a better MOV and a better SOS than Oklahoma. It will be interesting to see where those two teams are ranked this week, after checking in at 9 and 10 last week.
In other news? The Big 10 has two of the top 3 teams in the SRS, 3 of the top 7, and 4 of the top 12. Is it now the best conference in football? The SEC has …. Alabama. And the SEC East has 0 teams in the top 25. But don’t ignore the P12: they have four top-10 teams, five in the top 16, and all but one are in the top half of these rankings. It’s not top-heavy, but the Pac-12 may be the best conference in college football this year.
