A chaotic Week 7 cracked the AP Top 25 wide open, but Oklahoma won’t be part of the reshuffle.
The Sooners were in position to become one of the weekend’s upset spoilers as 6.5-point favorites, yet they let a late lead slip away and fell to No. 15 Kentucky, 21-13, on Saturday in Norman. Instead of cashing in on a wild day across college football, Oklahoma watched the madness unfold from the wrong side of the result.
And there was plenty of madness to watch. ESPN noted that Week 7 was the first time since the AP Poll launched in 1936 that five teams in the top 8 lost on the same day.
No. 1 Georgia, No.
2 Notre Dame, No. 5 Indiana, No.
6 Alabama and No. 7 Texas all went down, sending the rankings into a complete shakeup.
There were more moving pieces beyond those headline losses, too, with ranked-on-ranked games and underwhelming performances adding even more turbulence to the poll picture. In other words, voters have a mess on their hands.
Here’s how the AP Top 25 looks likely to settle after the weekend:
- Miami
- BYU
- Ohio State
- Ole Miss
- Texas Tech
- Notre Dame
- Georgia
- Tennessee
- Indiana
- UCLA
- Utah (winning as of writing)
- Alabama
- Kentucky
- Houston
- Iowa
- USC
- Wake Forest
- Missouri
- Florida
- LSU
- Texas
- Boise State
- SMU
- Northwestern
- Oklahoma State
For the third straight week, the top spot is expected to change hands. Miami looks like the choice, even though the Hurricanes needed extra effort to get past Florida State.
BYU has a case after knocking off then-No. 2 Notre Dame, but vaulting all the way from No. 8 to No. 1 may be too aggressive for the voters.
After that, the top five is basically rebuilt from scratch. With Georgia, Notre Dame and Indiana all losing, Ohio State is the lone holdover in that upper tier after edging Indiana 19-15 in a game that came down to the slimmest of margins.
What happens next will come down to how voters sort out quality wins, bad losses, schedule strength and, inevitably, some name recognition. Oklahoma, though, won’t be entering that conversation at 3-3.
If the Sooners had beaten Kentucky and stacked a second straight top-15 upset, they would have climbed sharply and put themselves in line for a major rise inside the top 20. Instead, they’re on the outside looking in.
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Kentucky did what gritty road winners often do: it stayed alive, kept pressure on, and made Oklahoma pay for turnovers at every turn. The Wildcats did not need to dominate the stat sheet to leave Norman with the result they wanted, and for the Sooners the frustrating part is how much the game felt there for the taking before the giveaways took over. [Read more 🡒]