Oklahoma football: Five best Sooner teams of all-time
By Chip Rouse
In recent weeks, we’ve singled out for you what we believe were both the five best games and the five best teams during Bob Stoops’ phenomenal 18 seasons as head coach of Oklahoma football.
Now we are taking that one step further — or, actually, a couple of giant steps — and pick the five best Sooner football teams of all-time.
Oklahoma has been playing varsity football for 122 seasons, which is an incredibly large sample size from which to select the five best. Because very few of us know much about, or can even recall anything about the OU teams that played before World War II, we’ve chosen to simplify the selection process, which also will make the outcome more meaningful.
For purposes of this analysis, we have narrowed the parameters to Sooner football teams from the Bud Wilkinson era forward to the present day (1946- present).
In Oklahoma’s first 52 football seasons (1895-1946), the Sooners won 252 games. In the 70 years since (1947-2016) they have compiled 609 wins, or 71 percent of their 861 total wins as a program. Those latter 70 seasons take in the coaching eras of Oklahoma’s three winningest head coaches.
Wilkinson (17 seasons), Barry Switzer (16 seasons) and Stoops (18 seasons) combined for 492 wins in 51 seasons, an average of almost 10 wins per season.
All three coaches have at least one team among the five we consider to be the best Oklahoma teams of the modern era of college football (post World War II to the present). And as you would suspect, all five teams were national champions.