College Football Playoff & Bowl Projections: Where The Oklahoma Sooners Stand After Week 14

Tyler Jones

Dec 4, 2025

Dec 4, 2025

Latest Bowl Projections for the Sooners from key sources including CFP Rankings, ESPN, CBS Sports, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, On3, The Athletic, Athlon Sports, and Saturday Down South

While Championship Saturday delivers drama across the country, Oklahoma fans can finally exhale. With the regular season in the books, the Sooners are a virtual lock for the 2025 College Football Playoff after closing out with a gritty 17-13 win over LSU in their final home game at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.

Brent Venables’ team finished 10-2, with their only blemishes being a narrow loss against Ole Miss, as well as a tough defeat delivered by Texas earlier in the year.

That résumé, combined with head-to-head wins over Alabama and several top-25 foes, has all but guaranteed OU a spot in the 12-team field.

Now the questions shift from “if” to “where” and “who.”

Will Oklahoma host a first-round game?

Virtually every major projection—ESPN, The Athletic, CBS Sports, 247Sports—has the Sooners seeded between No. 6 and No. 8, which would earn them a home playoff game in Norman the weekend of December 19-20.

The only lingering variable is whether a chaotic set of championship-game upsets could push a conference champion ahead of them, but even then, Oklahoma’s strength of schedule and marquee wins make that scenario unlikely.Who would come to Norman?

This is where the crystal balls diverge.

The majority view has Oklahoma facing either Notre Dame or Alabama in a mouthwatering first-round clash.

The Irish lead the modern series (since 1950) 8-2, including a painful 30-13 beatdown in Norman in 2012 that still stings for many Sooner fans (made worse that night by the Thunder trading James Harden during the game—an unofficial state holiday of despair).

Oklahoma got revenge the following year in South Bend, 35-21, behind Blake “Belldozer” Bell and a defense that forced three turnovers.

A 2025 playoff edition would be the first postseason meeting ever between the two programs and would pit Marcus Freeman’s physical, veteran-laden Irish against a demanding Venables defense.

Alabama would be pure vengeance theater. The Sooners have stunned the Crimson Tide twice in the last 13 months: 24-3 in Norman in 2024 and, most recently, a 23-21 thriller in Tuscaloosa on November 15, 2025, that likely cost Kalen DeBoer’s team a first-round bye.

In that game, OU’s secondary picked off Ty Simpson twice and the defensive line lived in the backfield, sacking the former Heisman contender four times.

Alabama enters the postseason limping, not playing their best ball, while Oklahoma’s defense has forced nine turnovers in its last four games.

There is one notable outlier: Sports Illustrated’s Bryan Fischer projects Oklahoma drawing the ACC champion Virginia Cavaliers instead.

The programs have met only once, a 48-14 Oklahoma rout in the 1991 Gator Bowl under Gary Gibbs. Virginia would need to defeat Duke in the ACC Championship to earn a CFP bid.

Bottom line: Oklahoma is in, Norman is almost certainly hosting, and the most likely opponents carry decades of bad blood.

Whether it’s gold helmets or crimson jerseys walking into a deafening Memorial Stadium in three weeks, the Sooners have what it takes to beat either one.

Now they get the chance to do it when it matters most—on their own turf, in December, with a quarterfinal berth on the line.

Sooner Nation has waited a long time for a playoff moment like this.

Come the selection show on Sunday, December 7, they’ll finally learn which historic rival stands in the way of a deeper run.

College Football Playoff and Bowl Projections

CFB Playoff Selection Committee:

CFP 1st Round