Oklahoma Football 2016 Kickoff Down to 21 Days and Counting
By Chip Rouse
Twenty-one days. That’s all that’s left for Oklahoma football fans before the opening kickoff of another action-packed college season and the return to action of college football’s winningest team in the modern era.
We’ve written several times in this space over the last month about the prodigious success enjoyed by the University of Oklahoma in football over the last seven decades.
To be more specific, no major college team has won as many games as the Sooners since the end of World War II. Since the 1946 season, Oklahoma has recorded 617 victories, 45 more than the next closest team. Ohio State stands second to the Sooners with 572 total wins during the same time span.
The Sooners and Buckeyes go head to head on Sept. 17 in Norman for surprisingly just the third time in the long history of both teams. The two teams split the two previous games, with the road team winning both times (Oklahoma at Ohio State in 1977, and Ohio State in the game played in Norman in 1983).
Ironically, the last time the Buckeyes and Sooners played in Norman was Sept. 17, 1983, with Ohio State winning 24-14, avenging the 29-28 Oklahoma victory six years earlier in Columbus.
The all-time Oklahoma winning percentage of .720 (861-319-53) is fourth-best in college football history, behind Notre Dame (.732), Michigan (.730) and – there they are again – Ohio State (.722).
It might not surprise many Sooner fans to learn that the best decade for Oklahoma football was the 1950s and the great Oklahoma teams of legendary head coach Bud Wilkinson. From 1950 through 1959, the Sooners put together an overall record of 93-10-2 (.895), including three national championships (1950, ’55 and ’56) and a conference championship every year in that decade.
Oklahoma was the winningest program in college football during the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, when the Sooners won 103 games, lost just 13 times and played to a tie in three games. Their .877 winning percentage during the Barry Switzer coaching years and the birth of the Wishbone offense beat out Alabama (.863) and Michigan (.848) as the best college team of the decade. OU won two national championships and eight consecutive conference titles from 1972-79.
The Sooners best decade based on number of wins was under Bob Stoops in the first decade of the 21st century (2000-09). Oklahoma was 110-24 (.821) in those 10 years, the third best winning percentage in the country. Only Boise State (which stunned OU in a highlight-reel upset in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl) and Texas had higher win percentages than the Sooners in that decade.
If you are wondering about the present decade (2010-2019), which we are now six years into, Oklahoma’s 62 total wins (with 17 losses) is tied with Clemson for eighth best in college football. Alabama has been the best team in the present decade with 10 more total wins than the Sooners, at 72.