The Oklahoma Sooners entered the 2026 season hoping to return to the College Football Playoff and improve on last year's result. Instead, OU had four losses entering the month of November, and those expectations went down the drain.

Now, head coach Brent Venables and his team are focusing on doing what it takes to make it to a bowl game this season, along with having the best finish to the season that they possibly can. The last time OU missed a bowl was in 1998, which was the final season of the John Blake era. Bob Stoops was hired to replace him, and Oklahoma has made it to bowl season for 27 straight years. After last week's win over Florida, one more win for the 2026 Sooners will extend that streak.

In the SEC, the teams that qualify for the CFP are off the board for the remaining bowl selections. The Citrus Bowl picks the top SEC team that doesn't qualify for the playoff.

After that, there's a pool of six bowls, with no pecking order, that will consult with the SEC and school personnel to determine where teams are scheduled. They'll try to create the best possible matchups. For 2026, those bowls (in no particular order) are the Gator Bowl, the Las Vegas Bowl, the Liberty Bowl, the Music City Bowl, the ReliaQuest Bowl, and the Texas Bowl.

After that, two more bowls, the Birmingham Bowl and the Gasparilla Bowl, will pick from any bowl-eligible SEC teams that still don't have a landing spot.

In his latest bowl projections, USA TODAY Sports' Erick Smith has the Sooners headed to the Gator Bowl, which will be played on December 30th. Last season, Virginia beat Missouri in the Gator Bowl, which pits the SEC against the ACC in Jacksonville, Florida at EverBank Stadium.

OU's projected opponent in that game is the Clemson Tigers, and the two schools have met five times on the gridiron. Clemson owns a 3-2 series lead, including wins in each of the three most recent matchups. They beat the Sooners 13-6 in the Florida Citrus Bowl for the 1988 season (played in January of 1989), which ended up being Barry Switzer's last game at Oklahoma.

The Tigers also beat the Sooners in bowl games to conclude the 2014 and 2015 seasons, when Venables was in Clemson as the program's defensive coordinator. That second matchup came in a CFP semifinal game in the Orange Bowl. The Sooners won the first two meetings, both of which came in Norman in the regular season in 1963 and 1972.

Oklahoma still has a fight on its hands if it wants to make a 28th-straight appearance in a postseason game. At the start of the season, a trip to the Gator Bowl would've been a disappointment. Now, it'd mean that OU won at least one more game in '26 to keep the bowl streak alive.