Oklahoma football: Where does OU-Texas rate among best college rivalries?

This Saturday marks what for years has been the signature game on the Oklahoma football calendar as well as one of the headline games of the college season.

It doesn’t much matter what source you reference, the annual interstate gridiron grudge match between Oklahoma and Texas should show up as one of the all-time top-five college football rivalries.

This year will be the 112th meeting in football between the Sooners and the Longhorns. Since 1932, the game has been played at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Except for three years, the game has been played in Dallas since 1912, the idea being that Dallas is a neutral geographical site and approximately equidistant from both campuses.

The two teams not only share a physical border that divides the two states, but also a physical divide at the game site, with half the stadium, from 50-yard line to 50-yard line,  decked out in Oklahoma’s crimson color and the other half in burnt orange Texas school colors. The stadium color divide in the is one of the special features that makes this rivalry game so unique.

Texas is the only Big 12 school that owns an all-time winning records against Oklahoma and one of the very few teams in the country that the Sooners have played more than a handful of times that can make that claim. The Longhorns have won 61 of the 111 games between the two hated rivals; Oklahoma has won 45 times and five games have ended in a tie.

Texas won 20 of the first 30 games in this century-old football rivalry. Since the end of World War II (1946-2016), the two schools have split 68 games and played to three ties. In the last 33 games, OU leads the series 18-13-2, and in the Big 12 era (1996-present), the Sooners own a 12-9 advantage over their rivals from south of the Red River.

The Longhorns own two eight-game winning streaks in this longtime rivalry (1940-47 and 1958-65). In fact, from 1958 to 1970, Texas won 12 of 13 games in the series. Oklahoma’s longest win streak in the Red River rivalry series has been six games in the heyday of the Bud Wilkinson era of Sooner football, 1952 to 1957).

This year’s game marks another historic milestone in this long-standing rivalry. It will be the first time since 1947 that both schools come into the game with a new head coach. The last time that happened was 80 years ago, when OU’s Wilkinson and Blair Cherry of Texas were in the first year as head coach at their respective schools.

Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley and Tom Herman of Texas are will be coaching in their first Oklahoma-Texas game as head coaches. Riley may have a slight edge in that department, but only because he was the Sooners’ offensive coordinator the past two seasons, making this his third trip to Dallas as part of the Red River Showdown.

Oklahoma Sooners Football

Wilkinson lost to Texas in his first season as head coach of the Sooners, but went 9-8 against the Longhorns in his 17 seasons at the helm of the OU football program. By comparison with two other OU head coaches who are members of the 100-win club while at Oklahoma, Barry Switzer was 9-5-2 against Texas, and Bob Stoops won 11 of 18 games, including five in a row from 2000 to 2004.

Stoops also owns the biggest margin of victory in the series, a 65-13 Oklahoma victory in 2003, the same season Sooner quarterback Jason White became the OU’s fourth Heisman Trophy winner.

The winning school every year is awarded the Golden Hat, a gold, 10-gallon hat, a trophy that is kept by the winning school’s athletic department until the next year.

Since the first year of the Associated Press Top 25 Poll, at least one of the two teams in the Oklahoma-Texas rivalry series have come into the game as a ranked team, and there have been numerous times over that span when both teams have been ranked in the top five nationally. The most recent time that happened was in 2008, when Sam Bradford was the quarterback of No. 1-ranked OU, and Colt McCoy quarterbacked the No. 5 Longhorns. Texas won that game 45-35, the most combined points scored in the rivalry series all-time.

It was No. 2 Oklahoma and No. 5 Texas n 2004, No. 2 Oklahoma vs. No. 3 Texas in 2002 and No. 3 OU vs. the No. 5 Longhorns in 2001.

Twelve times in the 111-game history of the series, one of the two teams has been ranked No. 1 in the country at the time the Red River game was contested (OU eight times; Texas four times). Only once, in 1963, has it been a battle of No. 1 (Oklahoma) and No. 2 (Texas). The Longhorns came out on top in the 1963 battle of 1 vs. 2, 28-7.

The two school alternate as the home team in this rivalry game. Texas is the host school in this year’s game, which means the Sooners will be in their traditional all-white uniforms. The home team has won each of the last five games in the series and seven of the last eight.

We can only hope that is not an omen for the outcome of Saturday’s Red River grudge match.