Oklahoma vs. Texas: Five Longest Win Streaks in Red River Rivalry
By Chip Rouse
At the Texas state fairgrounds in Dallas on Saturday, Oklahoma vs. Texas will be the main attraction of the day, but the historic rivalry won’t be as big a deal nationally as it has been in the past.
Saturday will be the 111th meeting on the gridiron between the Sooners and the Longhorns, one of the oldest and best rivalries in college football. In 2005, the Dallas Morning News asked the football coaches at 119 NCAA Division I schools to identify what they thought was the best rivalry game. The annual OU-Texas game ranked third behind only Michigan-Ohio State and Army-Navy.
Texas owns a 61-44-5 record in the all-time series and is the only school with a winning record against the Sooners. Since the end of World War II, however, the series has been much closer than that, with the Longhorns holding a 36-33-3 advantage.
If you break down the Red River rivalry series even further, over the last 32 games (1984-2015), Oklahoma leads the series 17-13-2. Since Bob Stoops became the head coach of the Sooners in 1999, OU has won 10 of 17 games.
Barry Switzer, who coached in 16 rivalry games with Texas as the Sooners head coach has the best record vs. the Longhorns of the four legendary Oklahoma coaches who have exceeded 100 wins. Switzer was 9-5-2 against Texas. Stoops, the winningest coach in OU football history, has the most wins in the rivalry with 10.
Bud Wilkinson, who won 145 games at Oklahoma, won nine and lost eight times. Bennie Owen, who served as the Sooners’ head coach for 22 seasons (1905-1926), broke even with an 8-8 mark against the Texas Longhorns.
The two biggest blowouts in this historic series have occurred since Stoops arrived in Norman. The Sooners won 63-14 in 2000 and scored over 60 points again in 2003, winning 65-13 behind Heisman Trophy-winner Jason White.
Oklahoma won five games in a row over their archrivals from the Lone Star State between 2000 and 2004 by an average score of 38-11.
Here are the five longest win streaks in the history of the Red River Showdown:
1940-1947 (8) – Eight games is the largest win streak that either school has put together in this century-old series, which began in 1900, with Texas beating Oklahoma 28-2 in a game played in Austin. Between 1940 and 1947, the Longhorns came out on top of the Sooners in eight consecutive games. Five of the eight games, however, were decided by seven or fewer points. The Sooners snapped the Texas win streak at eight, winning in 1948, Bud Wilkinson’s second season at the Sooner helm. The Sooners followed the eight-game losing skid to Texas with three consecutive wins of their own.
1958-1965 (8) – It wasn’t that long after their eight-game winning streak over the Sooners in the 1940s that the Longhorns mounted a second eight-game streak in the late 1950s and early ’60s in the latter years of Bud Wilkinson’s 17-season Oklahoma coaching tenure. Interestingly, Darrell Royal was the head coach of the Longhorns during this time. Royal played quarterback for Wilkinson at Oklahoma from 1947-49.
1922-1932 (6) – Over the span of 11 years from 1922 to 1932, Oklahoma and Texas played only six times. There were no games between the two schools for five consecutive seasons, beginning in 1924. The Longhorns won all six games played during that 11-year stretch. The Sooners reached double digits just twice in those six games, and in two of the contests, the Longhorns held Oklahoma scoreless.
1952-1957 (6) – Oklahoma won six times between 1952-57, during the height of the Sooners record-setting 47-game winning streak. During this time, Texas wasn’t the only team that couldn’t beat the Sooners. The Longhorns had plenty of company. In fact, had Texas not edged OU 9-7 in the 1951 game, Oklahoma would have mounted a string of 10 consecutive Red River victories, which would have been the longest in the history of this great rivalry series.
1971-1975 and 2000-2004 (5) – Oklahoma produced a pair of five-game win streaks in the Red River series, 30 years apart. It was the battle of the Wishbone offenses in the early ’70s, and the scores of the games reflected the explosiveness of the triple-option attack. Barry Switzer was the OU offensive mastermind during the Sooners five-game win streak in the 1970s, and Bob Stoops’ Oklahoma teams duplicated the feat in the early 2000s, when the game was marketed as the Red River Shootout.
Four different times in this rivalry series, the two hated rivals from neighboring states separated by the Red River produced four-game win streaks. Texas did it three times, and Oklahoma once.