The No. 3-seeded Oklahoma baseball team won their third straight game in the Big 12 Championship on Saturday and will play for the tournament championship on Sunday. Oklahoma defeated No. 7 seed Kansas State 4-3 Saturday afternoon at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. The win eliminated the Wildcats from the double-elimination conference tournament. The […]
The No. 1-ranked men’s Oklahoma golf team shot a seven-over par 287 over the opening 18 holes of the NCAA Championship on Friday, good for sixth place, five strokes back of the leader Vanderbilt. The 2022 NCAA Men’s Golf Championship is being played at par-70 Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona. Thirty teams are competing […]
The top-seeded Oklahoma softball team is one win away from getting back to the Women’s College World Series to defend its 2021 national championship. The WCWS has been like home to the Sooners in recent seasons, and the No. 16 UCF Knights are the only thing standing in the way of Oklahoma making its sixth […]
Oklahoma baseball has beaten top 10-ranked Texas Tech four times this season, and the 6-3 victory over the Red Raiders was the biggest of the four. The Sooners (35-20) handed Texas Tech a third loss in less than a week with a 6-3 victory over the Red Raiders in the Big 12 Championship Thursday night. […]
Peyton Graham stroked a grand slam, Tanner Tredaway delivered four hits and Carson Atwood got his first career start in leading the No. 3-seeded Oklahoma baseball team to a 6-4 win over West Virginia in the opening round of the Big 12 Championship. Graham’s second-inning grand slam off of West Virginia starter Jacob Watters staked […]
Can OU put up another season of double-digit wins?
Before every college football season, I like to put together a win total projection for the Oklahoma Sooners. The process is kind of a combination of art and science:
Using my own set of power ratings, I set a point spread for every game on OU’s schedule.
Based on the point spreads, I determine the likelihood the Sooners will win each game.
I convert that likelihood to a fraction of a win.
Lastly, I tally up the fractions of wins to estimate a projected total for the end of the season.
Let’s use OU’s home date with Baylor on Nov. 5 as an example. On a neutral field, I would make the Sooners a 5.5-point favorite over the Bears this year. Since the game is being played in Norman, I’m adding 2.5 points to the OU side. That puts the point spread at eight. (I might have been inclined to shave off a half point or so in the past to reflect Baylor coach Dave Aranda’s track record against the Sooners; with Brent Venables and company on the sidelines now instead of Lincoln Riley’s staff, we’ll wipe the slate clean.) Teams favored by eight points win 73% of the time, so I add 0.73 wins to OU’s final total.
Last year, my projection overshot OU’s actual win total by a full game. Here’s what I came up with for 2022:
A total of 9.67 suggests the Sooners will win between nine and 10 games this fall. If you were an oddsmaker trying to establish an over/under bet based on this projection, you would probably set it at 9.5 with the juice solidly to the over.
A few notes:
*FanDuel Sportsbook has already set lines on a handful of these games, and it looks like the linesmakers in that shop have a lower opinion of this OU team:
FanDuel put the OU season win total at 8.5, paying -155 to the over and +130 to the under. Even at that relatively steep price, my projection points to an over bet.
*I don’t think it would be absurd to make Texas a slight favorite over the Sooners at this point, especially in light of how the Red River Rivalry tends to get bet in the offseason.
*I feel confident that I’m either too low on the spread in the Texas Tech game or too high on the West Virginia line.
*I did shade the lines downward a touch in a few cases. I gave an extra two points to Nebraska, for instance, because of the setting and circumstances in Lincoln. Despite my skepticism about Iowa State this season, I shaved off two points for playing in Ames on a Thursday night. I also revised the Bedlam game down, given that is, in fact, Bedlam.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23590530/OU_22_Win_Total.jpg)