Oklahoma State Projected to Make the 2026 College Football Playoff Field

A day after a way-too-early Top 25 featured Oklahoma State, the Cowboys are headed to the playoffs.

ESPN analytics guru Bill Connelly released a projection of what the 2026 College Football Playoff field, and he went out on a limb for the Cowboys.

Connelly based his projection on Mark Schlabach’s Way-Too-Early Top 25 which had the Cowboys coming in at No. 25 and then predicted how a potential field of 12 would play out based on that ranking.

Based on the College Football Playoffs’ current makeup, seven teams will get an at-large bid. Six of those were accounted for in Schlabach’s projections for 2024 and 2025, satisfying one of Connelly’s two rules. The second rule, proved by Oklahoma in 2025 and Indiana in 2024, a team will get in that had a losing record last season.

That team would be the Cowboys, according to Connelly.

Hear me out! Were the Cowboys abjectly hopeless in 2025? Absolutely. They plummeted to 1-11 with what was, per SP+, their worst team since 1963 (and they had some awfully bad teams in the 1990s). But they made a potentially dynamite hire in Eric Morris — one of my favorite hires of the cycle — and he has basically imported his dynamite North Texas offense, bringing in 17 former Mean Green players including stars in QB Drew Mestemaker, RB Caleb Hawkins and WR Wyatt Young. OSU will score plenty of points in 2026, and if the Cowboys’ close-games luck flips as well, they could be a huge turnaround story. [ESPN]

Taking it a step further, Connelly projected OSU as an 11 seed to face 6-seeded Texas A&M. The Pokes fall to the Aggies in this hypothetical emotional roller-coaster.

Connelly did walk it back a bit, qualifying the Cowboys’ CFP prediction as an “outlandish pick” and this all for fun anyways. But that doesn’t dampen the excitement surrounding the Cowboys’ program moving into 2026.

Under Eric Morris, the Cowboys’ transfer class portal (with a nation-leading 54 commits) is ranked No. 6 in the nation according to 247Sports, as of writing.