Winner of Auburn vs. Oklahoma can make early case as SEC, College Football Playoff contender

Do you want to share your predictions, analysis or thoughts on Saturday’s Week 4 college football games? Get involved with our coverage at live@theathletic.com.

They started the season with two coaches on the hot seat. Auburn fans worried Hugh Freeze spent too much time playing golf. Oklahoma fans wondered whether Brent Venables’ furious remaking of much of the program would be enough.

This week they meet, and the storyline is flipped: Auburn and Oklahoma are both unbeaten, both armed with a marquee nonconference win, and both with a chance to rise in the conversation for the College Football Playoff.

Especially in an SEC that now looks wide, wide open.

Auburn and Oklahoma are two proud programs with high expectations. Both have a national championship this century and played for a second. Oklahoma was a perennial four-team Playoff contender before joining the SEC. And both have noticeably slipped: Auburn hasn’t had a winning season since 2020 and Oklahoma has had two losing seasons out of the past three.

Yet Freeze and Venables didn’t play down expectations for this season.

“I truly believe that in the playoff run we’re going to be in this discussion because I love this team,” Freeze said in July at SEC media days. “We embrace the fact that that is what Auburn should be, in those talks year in, year out. It takes a little time to build it, and we’ve been doing that.”

Venables said the same.

“The expectations here and in the locker room are to win at the very highest level and to compete for a championship. That’s always been the way it is here at the University of Oklahoma,” Venables said. “We embrace those standards and expectations of excellence. You choose to come to Oklahoma to coach or to play on the biggest stage, in the biggest games.”

Saturday sets up as a big game.

It’s getting as much attention for being the Jackson Arnold Bowl: Arnold, the former five-star Oklahoma quarterback recruit, transferred after a rough couple of seasons, ending up at Auburn. The Sooners replaced him with Washington State’s John Mateer. So far, both moves are working out. Mateer is leading the SEC in passing yards per game, and he rushed for 74 yards and a touchdown in OU’s marquee win over Michigan two weeks ago. Arnold racked up 137 rushing yards in the season-opening win at Baylor and hasn’t thrown an interception.

They weren’t the only changes this offseason. Venables hired a new offensive coordinator, Ben Arbuckle, and four other new assistants, and Jim Nagy, formerly head of the Senior Bowl, was brought in as the program’s general manager. Auburn added receiver Eric Singleton, who was Georgia Tech’s leading receiver.

Three games in, both teams are revitalized. And the winner Saturday will put itself in good — but still tenuous — position in the suddenly muddled SEC race.

It’s still early, but the top three in the SEC preseason poll have all — to use a golf term Freeze might or might not appreciate — come back to the field:

• Texas: The preseason favorite lost at Ohio State, which wasn’t so bad, but didn’t look wonderful the next two times, especially Arch Manning.
• Georgia: The Bulldogs are still unbeaten, but would have lost if Tennessee made a field goal at the end of regulation.
• Alabama: The Crimson Tide lost their opener and go to Georgia in two weeks, so either they are picking up their second loss or none of the preseason top three will be unbeaten before October even arrives.

The preseason poll’s fourth-place team was LSU, which looked great after winning at Clemson. But Clemson has lost another and struggled against Troy, while LSU’s offense has become a new concern.

The teams picked fifth (South Carolina) and sixth (Florida) have also lost, the latter twice.

Meanwhile, eight of the bottom 10 teams have started 3-0, and Tennessee’s one loss is far from an elimination. The Volunteers made last year’s CFP after losing to Georgia and could do so again.

And seven of those 3-0 teams own a win over a power-conference team. That includes three programs that won nine or more games last year: Texas A&M (at Notre Dame), Ole Miss (at Kentucky) and Missouri (over Kansas). That also includes last year’s worst SEC team: Mississippi State (which beat Arizona State). And of course Vanderbilt, which has two road wins and will likely be 5-0 when it goes into Alabama on Oct. 4.

What makes the SEC even more of a muddle is the uneven scheduling across the conference, in this last season of an eight-game conference slate in a 16-team league. There are plenty more big games ahead, especially the more teams that stay in contention, but there are also many big games that won’t be played. So one can’t say for certain how it will sort out.

Just look at last year, where Texas was the only 7-1 team, Georgia needed a tiebreaker over Tennessee to be the other entrant in the SEC championship, and six different teams finished with 5-3 records. The result was Texas, Georgia and Tennessee being the only SEC teams in the CFP, while Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina were the first three left out, all feeling they had a strong case.

Maybe fortunes swing the SEC’s way this year and it gets a fourth team in the field, especially with Notre Dame already losing two games. Five teams, in fact, is a possibility.

But so is everybody beating up on each other, if the conference is as deep as it looked the first three weeks. Mississippi State no longer appears a doormat. Arkansas played Ole Miss close. South Carolina and Florida are down but still capable of beating anybody.

That all makes Auburn-Oklahoma vitally important for the winner. It’s not an eliminator for the loser, but in the fickle nature of the SEC, whichever coach loses could be the focus of more hot-seat chatter.

Freeze summed it up well Monday when laying out what he saw from Oklahoma — with an awareness that his Auburn team follows this game with a trip to Texas A&M, then hosts Georgia and Missouri, and so on.

“You’re looking, to me, at a team that should be in the Playoff discussions,” Freeze said of the Sooners. “I think we’re playing one of the better teams in (the SEC) this Saturday. And it’s probably the case the next few Saturdays.”

(Photo: John Reed / Imagn Images)