We each pick a dark horse to make the 2025 college football playoff.

You're not going to want to miss this.

What is up, everybody?

Thank you guys for joining us on the Thursday edition of Locker Room Talk.

And while the college basketball season has ended, it is now past us.

Congrats to the Fort of Gators on winning the national championship.

It's never too early to talk about college football because in reality, there is no offseason, and hopefully it's going to be here before we know it.

But where we want to start is a couple of dark horses that we each have to make the college football playoff.

Now, when you look around at the odds, guys, you really can just only find odds on teams to win the national championship right now.

But if the odds are high enough to win the Natty, you know they're going to be decently high to make the college football playoffs.

So we wanted to pick a couple of quote-unquote dark horses, at least how we define it.

And I want to start with one of mine, and that's Oklahoma.

Because to me, when I'm looking the recipe, in my opinion, for a team to have a

chance to not just win a national championship, but put themselves in a position to be able to play

for a national championship. It's three things. Obviously, quarterback is number one. I have the

offensive line and the defensive line, a combination of that. So the line of scrimmage number two, and then schedule.

Because to me, if you're a team that's not going to win your conference championship and get that automatic buy into the college football playoff,

kind of like we saw with Arizona State last year, then you're going to have to get to at least 10 wins, I think, in your regular season, like we

saw with Tennessee, there's other examples. So when you put those three things together, I fall on

Oklahoma right now. I know last year, you know, there's a lot of pressure on Brent Venables. He's

taken over the defensive play calling this year. It didn't go exactly how they wanted it to. And everybody will talk about Johnny Matier and Arbuckle coming from Washington State, and I'm going to get to that.

But when you look at the line of scrimmage for Oklahoma, and I want to start on the defensive side of the ball, you did lose some guys overall in that defense.

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