Five Best Sooner Football Season-Openers Over Last 70 Seasons
By Chip Rouse
For those among us who are diehard Oklahoma fans, the one redeeming factor about the final days of summer is that they always usher in the start a of new Sooner football season.
The Sooners generally begin the season in front of the home fans at spacious and loud Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, but that isn’t the case this year.
Oklahoma is headed south for a headline nonconference encounter with the University of Houston, supposedly on a neutral field (NRG Stadium), but hardly so when you consider that the venue is a mere 15 minutes away from the heart of the UH campus.
Unlike other two-game, home-and-home series that OU agrees to in putting together most of its nonconference slate several years out, the Sooners don’t get the home half of the Houston series until the 2019 season.
I’ll get into the game preview itself in a couple more days, but the point of this piece is to talk about the mostly ups, but some downs surrounding Sooner football season openers.
Oklahoma lost its very first season-opening football game in 1895. It was also the one and only game that season. The Sooners played an Oklahoma City town team and were soundly beaten by a score of 34-0. OU would not lose a game for the next three seasons, but at that point in time, the seasons were only two-games long.
Over the next 117 years, Oklahoma would win 90 times in its first game of the season, a winning percentage of nearly 80 percent. Overall, the Sooners own a record of 93-22-6 in season openers.
The Sooners have started the season at home 74 times in 121 seasons; 41 times they have begun the season on the road; and six times they have played their season-opener on a neutral field.
Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma teams from 1973 to 1988 won 15 of 16 season-opening contests, a winning percentage of .938. the highest of the four Sooner head coaches who won more than 100 games at OU. Switzer’s lone opening-game loss in 16 seasons on the Sooner sidelines as head coach came in 1982 at home against a non-ranked West Virginia team. Oklahoma was ranked ninth in the country to begin that season.
Bob Stoops is just a step behind Switzer, with a 15-2 record in the Sooners opening game of the season.
One of those two first-game losses under Stoops, however, was against a ranked team. The Sooners lost their season opener in 2009, 14-13 to BYU, in a game in which the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, OU quarterback Sam Bradford, went down with a shoulder injury in the first half. That was the only time, before this Saturday, that Oklahoma has played a ranked team on opening day under Stoops.
It may surprise you to learn that of OU’s four coaches with 100-plus wins, Bud Wilkinson fared the worst in season openers.
Wilkinson’s 11-5 record in opening games was modest by Oklahoma standards. That should probably come with an asterisk, however, because five of the opening games during the Wilkinson era were against ranked opponents, something that has only occurred eight times total in Sooner history before this season.
Here is what I consider to be the five best season-opening games for Oklahoma in the past 70 years, or since 1946 (and not necessarily because they were Sooner wins, because only three of them were):
Next: Sept. 26, 1953 - Notre Dame 28, Oklahoma 21