Oklahoma football: Four things that Lincoln Riley has done that Bob Stoops didn’t

Bob Stoops is the winningest Oklahoma football coach in the school’s glorious gridiron history, and he is credited with making the Sooners relevant again at the national level after a dismal five-year period preceding his arrival.

Stoops was a savior of Oklahoma football who came along at just the right time and stayed for 18 winning seasons. One of the most difficult things to do in sports at any level if you are a head coach is to follow a living legend. That’s the challenge that Lincoln Riley had when he was elevated to his first head-coaching job following Stoops’ surprise retirement in June of 2017.

The Sooners were a championship-level team when Stoops’ stepped away, and they have remained so under Riley’s leadership. If you were just looking at the season records, you wouldn’t even suspect there had been a change in head coaches. In fact, you can make a reasonable argument — and we are — that Riley has taken what Stoops handed him and actually improved upon it.

That last sentence is not meant as a knock on Stoops. Rather, the intention is quite the opposite. He and athletic director Joe Castiglione — but mostly Stoops himself —  deserve high praise for their wisdom and vision in persuading Riley to come to Norman in the first place five years ago. They clearly knew what they were doing, and the results speak for themselves.

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Stoops easily established himself as one of the legendary Oklahoma football coaches along with three other Sooner coaching icons, Bennie Owen, Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer. The latter three are honored with life-size bronze statues that sit in a grass park area immediately south of the Barry Switzer Center on the south end of Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. A statue of Stoops is ready to join the former coaching greats later this year.

Whether Riley’s career at Oklahoma will rise to the same level of prominence remains to be seen, but he has clearly hit the ground running, and after three highly successful season, this is truly his Oklahoma team, now and for the future.

Stoops’ remarkable accomplishments in his 18 seasons on the Oklahoma sideline are fairly well documented. They include a national championship, 10 conference championships, 18 winning seasons, 18 consecutive postseason bowl appearances and a pair of Heisman Trophy winners. And that’s just a sampling.

Riley’s Sooner resume as head coach covers just three seasons, only a sixth of the time covered in the Stoops era, but it is already steeped in impressive achievements: three consecutive Big 12 championships, three straight College Football Playoff appearances, wins in six of seven games against rivals Texas and Oklahoma State, two Heisman Trophy winners and two No. 1 overall NFL Draft picks.

Although their time in grade, to use a military term, is considerably different, Riley has already done some things that his predecessor didn’t. An obvious one is leading an Oklahoma team through a coronavirus pandemic and college sports shutdown. Here are three more:

• Bob Stoops was 31-7 (.816) in his first three seasons at Oklahoma. Riley won a total of 36 games and lost six, a winning percentage of .857, in his first three seasons as the Sooners’ head coach. We should probably note, however, that Stoops was 36-4 in years two, three and four of his Sooner reign, including a perfect 13-0 in 2000.
• Riley’s teams have recorded three straight 12-win seasons. Stoops had six 12-win seasons in 18 years (including three in a row from 2002 to 2004); Riley has had three 12-win OU teams in his first three seasons, half of the number Stoops had in 15 fewer seasons.
• Both Stoops and Riley have had two Heisman Trophy winners as well as a Heisman runner-up and all six were quarterbacks. Riley’s two winners and runner-up, however, came in back-to-back-to-back years (Baker Mayfield in 2017, Kyler Murray in 2018, and Jalen Hurts as runner up in the voting in 2019), all three coinciding with Riley’s first three season as head coach.
• The Sooners have ranked in the top three in the nation in total offense in each of OU’s three seasons under Riley (No. 1 in 2017 and 2018 and No. 3 in 2019). Stoops’ Oklahoma teams ranked in the top three nationally in total offense just once before Riley arrived in Norman and just once in the two years he was offensive coordinator under Stoops. In Stoops’ 18 seasons at the helm, Oklahoma ranked in the top 10 just six times in total offense.