Oklahoma football: High scoring hasn’t always been OU’s forte
By Chip Rouse
For the better part of the past decade, Oklahoma football has averaged better than 40 points per game as one of the highest scoring offenses in college football.
For the vast majority of the Oklahoma Sooners’ 125 college football seasons, putting points on the scoreboard has hardly been an issue. But that hasn’t always been the case.
In 1922, the 18th season under legendary head coach Bennie Owen, Oklahoma won just twice in an eight-game season. It represented the lowest win total in Owen’s 22 seasons on the football sidelines, the longest of any head coach in OU history.
Not only was it one of the extremely rare occasions when an Oklahoma football team would win only two games in an entire season, it also represented one of the lowest offensive scoring totals in Sooner history. Oklahoma did play three games that season that ended in a tie, but the combined Sooner point production in all three games was just 10 points.
In eight games in 1922, the Sooners scored a total of 66 points, an average of 8.25 per game.
If you think that was bad, two years later, in 1924, Oklahoma did itself one better. Again, the Sooners were victorious just twice in eight games, and it’s easy to see why when you manage just 28 points the entire season, including five games in which OU put zero points on the scoreboard.
The Sooners failed to score in five of their first six games in the 1924 season. The one game they did score in was the second game that season, a 14-7 win over Nebraska, which ended up becoming half of their scoring offense that entire season.
Another off year for Oklahoma in the scoring column occurred in 1934. Lewie Hardage was the head coach then and ’34 was his last of three seasons at the Sooner helm. OU registered three defensive shutouts that year, scoring a total of 50 points in the process. That would be the only games the Sooners would win in 1934.
OU was shut out itself four times that season, scoring just 21 combined points in the process. The 71 total points that season was one Oklahoma’s lowest scoring totals in its history other than the very early years when a season amounted to just two or three games.
The irony of all of this is there were games even earlier in Sooner football history when the Crimson and Cream totaled more than 100 points in a single game. We’ll get to that story in the coming weeks.