College Football: Preseason Top 25 Projections

It will be awfully tough for Lincoln Riley to match the success of his former boss, Bob Stoops. Back in the BCS era, Stoops won the national championship in 2000 in his second season with Oklahoma. Riley enters year two of his time in charge in Norman with a big question mark at quarterback. The Sooners lost Heisman winner Baker Mayfield to the first overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft.

Last year, Mayfield finished 2017 as the most efficient passer in the country for the second year in a row. Kyler Murray, like Mayfield a multi-year member of the team after transferring from a different Power Five school, looks like the best bet to replace the Heisman winner. But Murray brings a different style that is unlikely to match Mayfield’s production.

Still, there are a fair number of teams in the Big 12 who could reasonably be considered contenders in the conference. We will probably see several of the league’s teams ranked in the preseason AP Top 25, but none so highly as the usual suspects from Norman. Unlike Stoops, who got a second season with Josh Heupel to win the title, Riley will have to lean on a better-stocked defense to get the job done in 2018.