This isn't really a 'true or false' or 'yes or no' issue because there are so many variables involved.

I'll start by saying that in general it is unlikely to work well most years here in Oklahoma.

However, in this state we have widely varying soil types, widely varying annual rainfall amounts, and widely varying minimum, average and maximum soil and air temperatures. So, how successful you might be would depend on your soil type, your soil and air temperature during any given winter, and your rainfall. There's just too many variables involved for anyone to tell you "yes it will work where you live" or "no, it won't work where you live". The best I can manage is that it might work where you live some years and other years it might not.

If you have light, fluffy, humusy, well-drained soil with a neutral to slightly acidic pH, and if you have a warm to moderate winter, and if you have an average to dry winter, your odds of success go up. In heavy soil or with wetter or colder than average weather, your odds of success drop.

However, you also have to remember that there are lots of little rodents and other pests out there looking for food in the winter months, and some of them love to nest in some types of mulch. So, you may find you have something nibbling/gnawing on/devouring your potatoes, depending on what kind of pests you have around.

A larger issue is the way the weather swings from mild and fairly warm in winter to very cold and back again. If your potatoes make good underground growth and begin to emerge above the soil line or mulch line during the winter months, the topgrowth likely will freeze back to the ground during a colder period. If this happens repeatedly, you could lose the potatoes. Even if the tops regrow, the stress of freezing/regrowing normally lowers the yield of each plant.

In general, you plant potatoes 4-6 weeks before your average last frost in spring and this gives them time to begin growing below ground without danger of topgrowth emerging early enough to be frozen back. Potatoes grow best at temperatures between 45 and 55 during the night and between 65 and 75 degrees during the day, and most of us don't really have those temperatures consistently in the winter months.

You also may find you have excess moisture in winter (and especially this winter because of the El Nino weather pattern) and excess moisture can cause knobby potatoes if it occurs alternating with excessive dryness. When the plants go from 'too dry' to 'too wet' after tuber initiation has begun, new growth starts again and forms knobs. To avoid this if you plant winter potatoes, remember to water well once every 5-7 days if no rain is falling, and then hope a heavy rainfall doesn't come too quickly after you've watered.

If you aren't going to do anything except compost or throw away the sprouted potatoes, then you might as well plant them as an experiment. Or, plant half in the ground and half a couple of inches down in your compost pile. The heat created by decomposition in the compost pile might benefit winter potatoes. I'd just consider it an experiment and not get my hopes up real high in case it doesn't work out.

Sometimes, when digging potatoes in the fall, we miss a few small potatoes. Some of them we find completely rotted and yucky in late winter when we're digging in the bed prior to planting the next year's cool-season crops. A couple more we might find sprouted and growing. So, based on that, I'd say some may grow and others may not.

Dawn