Oklahoma Football: Looking Ahead to Kansas State
By Chip Rouse
Looking at the Oklahoma football schedule to begin this season, it was fairly apparent that the first six games of 2016 would be the most difficult stretch for the Sooners.
Game No. 6 on that slate will take place this Saturday, when OU hosts one of its all-time nemeses in coach Bill Snyder and the Kansas State Wildcats.
K-State has accomplished something that very few other teams have against the Sooners in the 18 seasons that Bob Stoops has been the head coach at Oklahoma: Come into Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium and win a game. And Snyder’s teams have done it not once, but twice, and have come close on several other occasions.
So it is easy to see why the Sooners will not be overlooking Kansas State this weekend in the wake of the huge emotional win over their primary rival, Texas, last Saturday.
The relationship between the two head coaches goes back much further than Stoops’ time in becoming the winningest coach in OU football history. Stoops played under Snyder when the latter was an assistant coach at Iowa, and then joined Snyder’s coaching staff at K-State in 1989, when Snyder took over the program Sports Illustrated called at the time “America’s most hapless team.”
Stoops served on Snyder’s K-State staff for seven seasons (1989-95), before moving on to Florida as defensive coordinator under Steve Spurrier. Mike Stoops followed his brother to Oklahoma in 1999, along with a couple of other K-State assistants, Chuck Mangino and Brett Veneables. In Bob Stoops first season at OU, there were three members of the Sooner coaching staff who the previous season had been on Snyder’s staff at Kansas State.
“They’re too good all the time,” –Bob Stoops, OU head coach, on why he doesn’t enjoy coaching against Bill Snyder of Kansas State.
Bob Stoops said this week in his regular Monday press conference that he did not like coaching against his former coach and mentor. “They’re too good all the time,” he quipped.
In actuality, though, Bob Stoops has done very well against his former team and head coach. In 12 games against coach Snyder and Kansas State, Stoops’ Oklahoma teams have gone 8-3 in those matchups, with one of the three losses coming in the 2003 Big 12 Championship, when the Wildcats whipped up on the No. 1-ranked and undefeated Sooners to the tune of 35-7.
In the last five meetings, however, all of which were won by the road teams, the Sooners have done no better vs. Kansas State than they have in their last five games with archrival Texas. Oklahoma is 3-2 the last five seasons against both teams.
This is the third year in a row that Kansas State has followed the Sooners’ annual Red River Showdown game with Texas on the schedule. OU and K-State split the two previous games, with the visitors winning both games.
Oklahoma could have, and probably should have, won the last game played in Norman between the Sooners and Wildcats. Kansas State extended its win streak at Oklahoma to two games, escaping with a 31-30 victory in 2014.
The Sooners will be looking to break K-State’s two-game win streak in Norman by making it two straight of their own, following last season’s 55-0 defensive gem in Manhattan.