ESPN Ranks Oklahoma State as a Top 35 Historical Program

Oklahoma State scored higher than I thought in ESPN’s recent exercise ranking all the college football programs from an historical perspective. Here are the criteria.

It’s a thorny, fun, fascinating question that we posed to 12 of our writers. We asked them to rate every current FBS program on a scale of 1-10, based on each school’s overall impact on the history of college football.

The top eight look like this:

1. Alabama
2. Notre Dame
3. Ohio State
4. Oklahoma
5. USC
6. Michigan
7. Texas
8. Nebraska

Oklahoma State checks in at No. 32 (tied with Ole Miss) with a score of 5.58 which is much higher than I thought. The 12 writers who voted all discussed their toughest rankings here, and OSU was not among them but Ole Miss was.

Yes, the Rebels are nationally relevant now, but it’s not like this has been a common theme for the program. Growing up in Oxford, the football program wallowed in mediocrity and constantly made real national contenders look good. Before that, you had to go all the way back to the 1960s to find real national success for this football program. So a “6” kind of felt high, but recent success and the wins from long ago made it hard to put the Rebels below the halfway point. And while it’s been impressive, it’s taken head coach Hugh Freeze four years to get the Rebels into the national spotlight, and even then, many are still wondering if this is a flash-in-the-pan situation or if Freeze can sustain long-term success. His win totals keep rising, so all signs point to this program sticking around the relevancy category

The same could be written about Oklahoma State I suppose with “1960s” replaced with “1980s.”

Teams ranked ahead of OSU and Ole Miss include Pitt, Georgia Tech, BYU, Virginia Tech, Iowa and TCU. Teams just behind them were Arizona State, Syracuse, Army, Boise State, Colorado, Minnesota and Cal. It’s pretty intriguing to me that OSU was a couple of slots from being the No. 3 Big 12 team on this list. Like Ole Miss, they’re going nowhere but up in the future with Mike Gundy at the helm.

You can see the full list here.