Week 0 is upon us! The start of the 2022 college football season is here. Though the Oklahoma Sooners will not kick off against the UTEP Miners for another 13 days (and counting), we get football this week.
Week 0 provides a fantastic opportunity to check out two of Oklahoma’s first three opponents. On Aug. 27, the Nebraska Cornhuskers take on Big Ten foe Northwestern, and UTEP will face North Texas.
With the season getting underway this week, Bill Connelly of ESPN updated his SP+ ratings (ESPN+) for a final look ahead of the 2022 season.
The Oklahoma Sooners come in at No. 4 behind Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State, the top three teams in the USA TODAY Coaches Poll and the AP Top 25. However, Georgia and Ohio State are flipped in the polls compared to the SP+ ratings.
Oklahoma moved up a spot from the last update in May.
The Sooners have the highest projected win total in the Big 12 at 9.8. The next closest is Oklahoma State with a projected win total of 8.3.
As always: 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, and, 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 year. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather to date. – Connelly, ESPN
Here’s a look at where each team on Oklahoma’s 2022 schedule ranks in the ESPN SP+ rating and their projected win total for the season.