Oklahoma football: Ranking the the Sooner teams of the past seven decades

Ever since the great Oklahoma football teams of the legendary Bud Wilkinson in the 1950s, the Sooners have been considered one of the juggernauts of college football.

Since 1950, the beginning of the decade that put Oklahoma on the map as a power to be reckoned with in college football, no college team has won more games than the Sooners. Sixty-eight percent of the Sooners’ 872 victories all-time have come since 1950.

Oklahoma won a total of 280 games in its first 55 seasons playing varsity football (1895-1949), and it took six seasons before the Sooners had registered a combined 10 wins. Oklahoma was not a bad football team over the first 55 years by any stretch. The Sooners won 67 percent of their games during that period, but they were not at prolific or prominent as they have been over the last six-plus decades.

Since the 1950 season, OU’s win total has reached 592, as compared to the 280 wins accumulated in the 55 years before that.

Three Oklahoma coaching legends — Bud Wilkinson, Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops — are credited with 492, or 83 percent, of the Sooners 592 wins in the last 66 seasons. Those three coaching icons in Oklahoma’s storied football history each won over 140 games while at OU and they roved the Sooner sidelines for 51 of those 66 seasons.

Stoops, who announced his retirement in early June this year, was the longest tenured of the three OU coaching greats as well as the winningest. Stoops coached the Sooners for 18 season and delivered a school-record 190 football victories. Switzer’s Oklahoma teams produced 157 wins over 16 seasons, Wilkinson’s teams won a total of 145 games in 17 seasons.

In two decades since the 1950s, Oklahoma football teams have won more than 100 games (2000s and1970s), and four times the Sooners’ combined win total eclipsed 90. Three times over the past six decades, the Oklahoma win percentage exceeded .800 (2000s, 1970s and 1950s).

Although the coaching Big Three of Oklahoma football each reigned for more than a single decade, you could effectively say that the 1950s belonged to Wilkinson’s teams, the 1970s represented Switzer’s best teams, and the 2000s were Stoops’ best 10 seasons at the helm.

So which 10-year-period of Sooner football, beginning with the 1950s, stands above the rest, and how would you rank the seven decades? Here is how I evaluated and ranked them: