Oklahoma football: Blanking the Sooners’ offense is rare occurrence

Oklahoma football has scored more points than any other team in college football, but the Sooner offense wasn’t nearly as prolific in the first half of the last century.

In the first 53 of Oklahoma’s 125 seasons of varsity football, the Sooners failed to score a point in 71 games. What that means is, between 1895 and 1947, the Sooners were shut out in 17 percent of their 427 games, or approximately once every six games.

That has not been the case, however, since legendary head coach Bud Wilkinson arrived on the scene and literally put Oklahoma on the national map as a force to be reckoned with in college football. Since 1947, Wilkinson’s first season in Norman, the Sooners have been held scoreless just 15 times in 861 games. For you analytical types that is once every 57 games, or once every five to six years.

The bottom line is: In the modern era of college football, the teams that have been able to keep Oklahoma off the scoreboard have accomplished something extremely rare.

Shutouts in football were obviously more common in the earlier years of the sport when the offenses were not nearly as explosive as they are today.

The Sooners were held scoreless in their very first game, losing 34-0 to an Oklahoma City town team in 1895. That was the only game Oklahoma would play that season, but the Sooners failed to score in 22 of their next 176 games over the next 23 seasons.

And between 1919 and 1940, a total of 22 seasons, the Oklahoma offense failed to score a single point in 43 games. In 1924, in Bennie Owen’s 20th of 22 seasons coaching Sooner football, the team was shut out in five of its eight games. In 1930, with Adrian Lindsey as head coach, the Sooners failed to score in each of their last three games and then opened the following season failing to score in three of their first four games.

Oklahoma football is synonymous with offense; pitching a defensive shutout against the Sooners is nearly impossible.

Perhaps the most noteworthy of all the games in which Oklahoma has failed to score occurred in 1957 in the eighth game of the season. The Sooners were riding an NCAA-record 47-game winning streak and had scored in 123 straight games when they ran into a tough-as-nails Notre Dame squad that made a single touchdown stand up in defeating Oklahoma 7-0 to snap the win streak and hold OU scoreless for the first time in 11 seasons under Wilkinson.

In the next six seasons, the Sooners were shut out four more times by their opponents. Besides the shutout by Notre Dame, Wilkinson’s teams failed to score twice in 1960 (24-0 to Texas and 7-0 to Colorado) and again in 1962 (a 17-0 loss to Alabama in the Orange Bowl).

Between 1967 and 1981 (six seasons under Chuck Fairbanks and nine under Barry Switzer), Oklahoma went 15 consecutive seasons without failing to score.

In 190 games under Switzer, Oklahoma was held scoreless in just two games: a 12-0 loss to USC in 1982 and 10-0 to Missouri in 1983.

The 1990s were not the best in Oklahoma’s storied history, but they did manage to score in every game in the six seasons that former Sooner linebacker Gary Gibbs was head coach.

And then came along Robert Anthony Stoops. In the 18 seasons that Bob Stoops was at the helm of Oklahoma football, the Sooners failed to score exactly zero times in 238 games, easily shattering the team’s previous record of 123 consecutive games without being shut out, and Lincoln Riley has extended that by another 42 games.

The Sooners’ current consecutive-games scoring streak is now at 280 games. The last time an Oklahoma team failed to score in a football game.

Now if they could just incorporate some of that same magic in reverse by keeping their opponents out of the end zone a few more times. The last time Oklahoma failed to score was Nov. 7, 1998, when Texas A&M shut out the Sooners 29-0. The last time held an opponent without a point was five seasons ago at Kansas State. OU blanked the Wildcats 55-0 a week after losing 24-17 to Texas, the Sooners only 2015 regular-season loss.