What's the number of times the letter "o" appears in:
No one's had a tougher early schedule this year than the Arizona Wildcats and Tulsa Golden Hurricane. Arizona has lost to Stanford, Oklahoma State, and Oregon, while Tulsa fell to Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Boise State. All of those teams are currently top ten squads.
Both teams are 1-3, Arizona having defeated Northern Arizona 41-10 and Tulsa beating Tulane 31-3.
Neither team is terrible, with Arizona ranking #48 and Tulsa #45 in our All-Division Strength Power Rating, putting them above average in the FBS despite 1-3 records.
Let's look a bit at their game results and what we can gather, just using margin of loss, to see how good their opponents are. We'll factor in a 3-point home field advantage and see if we can compare, in this admittedly simple way, some of the top teams in the country.
That pecking order puts Stanford at the top, well above the top Big Twelve teams, and Boise State lags behind quite a bit. We could extend things using LSU, a 40-27 winner over Oregon; they'd be on top of everyone at +38 according to this chart.
Of course each of these data points is just one game; it assumes Arizona played exactly the same, and Tulsa did likewise, from game to game. It ignores the fact that blowouts especially tend to be random, with a touchdown here or there being pretty much meaningless. That's why single-game chains like this one are a slipperly slope.
It turns out that Arizona and Tulsa each played three teams in the top six, at least according to our power rating. Arizona lost to #1, #3, and #5, while Tulsa fell to #4, #5, and #6. Note that Arizona's defense is ranked #23 in the nation; they played the top three offenses in the country.
Stanford is just a few points ahead of Oregon, like they are in the simpler one-game table. But the Ducks are only 3 points ahead of Oklahoma rather than 7. The Sooners are just barely ahead of Oklahoma State on both tables, while Boise is right behind the Cowboys. It's interesting that the pecking order is almost exactly the same, though LSU is in 2nd place here, and Tulsa ranks slightly ahead of Arizona instead of 9 points behind.
So from the games we've seen so far, it looks like Stanford and Oregon scored an extra touchdown against Arizona, while Boise State was kind to Tulsa by pulling Kellen Moore early in the third quarter. And Oregon's multitude of turnovers against LSU made the margin of that game worse than it should have been based on both teams' quality.
So what does the future hold for Arizona and Tulsa? Will they bounce back from 1-3 starts?
Both teams were forecast by SportsRatings to be 1-3 at this point, so it's not unexpected given their schedules. Arizona was projected to start 1-5, in fact, but to make a comeback and possibly (60% chance) be bowl-eligible. Now, it looks like they'll start 2-4, and game-by-game results give them a 6-6 record. But their odds of bowl-eligibility have fallen to 54% nonetheless. A lot of the decline is because Louisiana-Lafayette is looking like less of a "gimme" than they were in the pre-season.
Tulsa was projected to be a stunning success pre-season, going 9-3 game-by-game or 8-4 by cumulative projection. This assumed that Damaris Johnson would be back with the team after five games, which probably won't be the case. Based on how they've played so far without him, 9-3 might still be a reality. But their cumulative odds show that they should finish closer to 7-5. So despite still being favored in every game going forward, the chances that they'll avoid an upset are very slim. A C-USA West crown is still within their reach but it's not the slam-dunk it looked like at the beginning of the year.

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I found two hundred and twenty-two "o"s in the provided passage.
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