ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard Pick Oklahoma to Win National Title
Expectations have been high in Norman all offseason long, and the beginning of the new year is no different.
Saturday marks the opening of the college football season with a handful of Week 0 games going on across the country. With that, ESPN’s iconic pregame show College Gameday is back previewing the action not just for this week but all season long.
As is customary at the beginning of the season, the crew made their selections for conference champions along with who they believe will reach the College Football Playoff and win the national championship.
Well, a couple of the members are riding heavy with Oklahoma.
After all four analysts — Desmond Howard, David Pollack, Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit — unanimously selected the Sooners to win the Big 12 and reach the College Football Playoff.
But Howard and Herbstreit took it a step further and picked the Sooners to bring home the national championship trophy in January.
Lincoln Riley gets Gatorade bath after Cotton Bowl
Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports
Lee Corso and David Pollack both picked Georgia.
After Howard made his pick of OU, it was Pollack’s turn.
“I’m not gonna lie,” Pollack said. “I thought about doing that just because I’m just getting sick and tired of picking the same old, same old every year.”
After Corso picked Georgia, Herbstreit explained why he likes the Sooners.
“I got Oklahoma,” Herbstreit said. “Oklahoma and Lincoln Riley, finally, with all these tweaks — every time they get there, they get their doors blown out — they’ve made adjustments to the defense. They beat Alabama in the national championship.”
For what it’s worth, host of the show Rece Davis also offered a pick for OU to win the national title to break the tie.
“I was Oklahoma until you guys started picking it,” Davis joked.
Pollack: “So you broke the tie, you’re going with Oklahoma?”
Davis: “Yeah, I guess.”
Oklahoma has been a trendy national title pick by many over the course of the summer with the Heisman-favorite in Spencer Rattler leading the charge on what should be another powerful Riley offense along with a defense that should be one of the best in the country.
But to see a couple of college football’s biggest voices put their money where their mouth is and actually call their shot is certainly noteworthy.
But, as Riley said just this week, the team is not concerning themselves with selections such as these.
“Whatever they say in preseason, we all know it’s a bunch of garbage,” Riley said. “It doesn’t matter until we can (stop) reading and talking and actually play. Go look at preseason rankings through the years and then go look at postseason. It’s just a guess. I can’t ever remember a year coming in where people thought we were just going to be horrible. More importantly for us, our expectations haven’t changed. They’re the same every single year. Part of our expectation is to be able to block out any outside noise and remain focused on us being at our best.
“I don’t care what team what year, win, loss, whatever… When we’ve played at a high level and when we’ve controlled the things we can control, we’ve won just about all of them. I can’t think of one that I feel like we had just no shot. For us the focus has got to remain there. I do think there is an excitement and confidence about this team that if we can the best out of them we have a chance to play ball at a high level.”
Want to join the discussion? Click here to become a member of the AllSooners message board community today!
Sign up for your premium membership to AllSooners.com today, and get access to the entire Fan Nation premium network!
Follow AllSooners on Twitter to stay up to date on all the latest OU news.
