Five Toughest Oklahoma Football Opponents All-Time
By Chip Rouse
No. 5 – Would You Believe Northwestern?
Oklahoma and Northwestern have met just four times in history. Those four games have taken place over a period of seven decades. The Sooners have won just one of those games, and that was a 23-0 shutout over the Wildcats at Northwestern in the first game of the series in 1939. Tom Stidham was the Sooners’ head coach at that time in his third year of four at the helm.
The two teams have played just three times since then. Oklahoma has been on the losing end of all three, and it hasn’t even been close.
Bud Wilkinson lost just 29 games total in 17 seasons as the Sooners’ head coach, and two of those defeats came against Northwestern in successive seasons (1959 and 1960).
Coming off of a 10-1 season in 1958, Oklahoma opened the 1959 season at Northwestern, and came away with one of the most lopsided losses in the Wilkinson era. The Sooners lost 45-13 to the Wildcats to begin the 1959 campaign. The following year, in Norman, Oklahoma suffered a second consecutive opening-day loss to the same Northwestern team, this time 19-3.
These two teams would not meet again for 37 years, and it was John Blake’s time in the head-coaching chair to try to stem the Sooners’ losing skid against Northwestern. Again, it was the season opener, in 1997, and OU was at home. That didn’t seem to make much difference, though, as Oklahoma failed to score in a 24-0 Northwestern road victory.
The combined score of the four games between the Sooners and the Wildcats, out of the Big Ten Conference, is a very un-Oklahoma-like 88-39 in favor of Northwestern.
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