The toughest conference in college football only gets more difficult in 2024. The Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns officially became members of the [autotag]SEC[/autotag] on July 1. The SEC has long been the sports’ strongest league and now adds two of college football’s top ten programs of all time. The Sooners and Longhorns join an already impressive list of teams that the [autotag]Southeastern Conference[/autotag] has under its umbrella.
Some national analysts believe that Steve Sarkisian’s Texas team is more “SEC-ready” than [autotag]Brent Venables[/autotag] and Oklahoma. Sarkisian has been in Austin a year longer than Venables has been in Norman. He’s had more time to build the program his way than his rival has. Texas went to the [autotag]College Football Playoff[/autotag] last year and won the conference title, while OU settled for an Alamo Bowl berth, missing the conference championship game.
While not everyone believes that Oklahoma is lagging behind, most of the national media has the ‘Horns in the driver’s seat heading into the SEC.
ESPN College Football analyst Paul Finebaum is one such media member. The SEC expert and host of “The Paul Finebaum Show” thinks the Longhorns are in a better spot than the Sooners at this point in time. However, Finebaum said on his show Monday that he thinks OU will turn the tide. One of his callers asked if the Longhorns were ahead coming into the season, and Finebaum agreed, while also praising the job being done at Oklahoma.
“In this moment, it’s accurate,” Finebaum said. “I say this after having spent a couple of trips to Norman, but I don’t think it’s going to remain this way. I really like what I’m seeing out there.”
There’s a sense that Texas is trending upward, improving significantly each year under Sarkisian, following the Charlie Strong and Tom Herman debacles. There’s also a sense that Oklahoma is on a downward trend, after winning six straight Big 12 titles from 2015 to 2020 and making four trips to the Playoff in five years from 2015 to 2019. The Sooners haven’t done either in each of the last three seasons. Their last conference title game appearance was in 2020.
But, despite OU bottoming out in Venables’ first year at the helm to the tune of a 6-7 record in a rebuilding year in 2022, the Sooners bounced back in 2023 to go 10-3. While the questions about how they’ll hold up in the brutal SEC are fair, Finebaum went on to say that he thinks that Oklahoma is on its way back and doesn’t think there’s a downward spiral occurring anymore.
Finebaum has been very complimentary of Venables and the program in recent weeks. Multiple times, he’s praised the way the head coach is building things in Norman, and they way he’s turned the program around from where it was when he arrived. He stated that he believes Venables is ready for success and sustained winning because of the way he’s gone about changing the football team.
Oklahoma’s consistent success is an advantage they have over Texas. The Longhorns spent nearly fifteen years trying to be “back” and saw the Sooners continue to dominate the Big 12 in that timeframe. First impressions are lasting impressions, however, and it would benefit OU greatly if they made an early statement for their time in the SEC with a strong 2024 season.
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