Oklahoma Football: Pedal to the Metal; Most Lopsided OU Victories
By Chip Rouse
Former Oklahoma football coach Barry Switzer, in his pregame pep talk to his team, used to amp up the troops with the frequent battle cry: “Let’s hang half a hundred on them.”
High-scoring offenses has definitely become a part of the college game in today’s world, and Oklahoma has definitely been a part of all that offensive explosion over the past two decades.
Switzer’s Sooners scored half a hundred on multiple occasions in his 16 seasons as OU’s head coach, reaching a high-water point of 82 points in an 82-42 flattening of Colorado in 1980.
The 2007 Oklahoma team under Bob Stoops holds the points record for Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, scoring 79 in a 69-point win over North Texas in the season opener that season. Four years earlier, Oklahoma scored 77 in shutting out Texas A&M.
Even those point-a-minute scoring outputs, however, were far under the scoring margins enjoyed by several Oklahoma teams in the early 1900s, and all against a single opponent.
From 1897, officially the third season of varsity football at the University of Oklahoma, until 1919, practically every year, the Sooners’ slate of games included one with a small school called Kingfisher College, a religion-based institution with ties to the Congregational church. The school was located in the Oklahoma town of the same name, about 70 miles northwest of the Norman campus.
The Sooners and Kingfisher met on the football field every season but one from 1900 to 1919 (they did not play in 1918), with OU winning every encounter. The two teams played a total of 22 times. The Sooners won 19, and three games ended in a scoreless tie.
The scoreless contests, which came early in the series (1900, 1903 and 1904), are difficult to fathom when you consider that the combined score in the last dozen games between OU and Kingfisher was 979-5. That’s not a misprint. You read it right.
Kingfisher failed to tally a point in 11 of the final 12 games, and the Sooners eclipsed 100 points in three of the games (they also tallied 96 in one game). The scores in the final two games in the series, which ended in 1919, were far beyond crushing: 179-0 and 157-0 in favor of Oklahoma.
It’s no wonder the series ended after 22 games. The real reason, though, is that Kingfisher College closed its doors in 1922.