Oklahoma Football 2016: Season Kickoff 32 Days Away
By Chip Rouse
Editor’s note: Throughout the month of August, I will be counting down the days to the Oklahoma football opener with Houston, offering interesting pieces of trivia or tidbits about the upcoming season.
One-hundred twenty-one years is a long history of playing college football. And for the Oklahoma Sooners, it mostly has been a highly decorated one.
Over those 121 years, though, there have only been 21 men who have headed up the football program at OU, Bob Stoops being the 21st and current head coach.
As we reported recently in this space, Stoops’ 17 seasons in the position is the second longest of his 20 predecessors in the position. If he stays on for another four, including the forthcoming 2016 season, he will tie the legendary Bennie Owen as the longest-tenured Sooner football coach.
That’s saying a lot when you take into account that great coaching names like Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer all served in the position.
When you total up the length of time Oklahoma’s Famous Four coaches have served on the Sooner sidelines it comes to a combined 72 years. That accounts for nearly 60 percent of OU’s football history
Something else the foursome of Owen, Wilkinson, Switzer and Stoops have in common that is unique to college football is that they each achieved more than 100 wins on their watch: Owens (122), Wilkinson (145), Switzer (157) and Stoops (179 and counting).
That adds up to a combined 603 Sooner victories or close to 50 percent of the Oklahoma football wins all-time.
Oklahoma is the only school in college football at which four different head coaches have each won 100 or more games.
Among the four, Stoops has the most wins (179) and games coached (225), Switzer is the career leader in winning percentage (.837) and Owen in years as head coach (22).
By contrast, John Harts, the Sooners’ first head coach when they began play in 1895, coached the fewest games at Oklahoma (1) and former OU player John Blake, who served as the Sooner head coach for three seasons (1996-98) before Stoops took over, owns the all-time marks for the lowest winning percentage (.353) among the Oklahoma coaches who coached more than one game. Blake’s teams won just 12 times in 34 games.