It really doesn’t seem to matter what sport you are talking about, anytime it is Oklahoma vs. Kansas State, you can count on it being highly competitive and often very unpredictable right down to the bitter or euphoric end.
Head coach Bob Stoops will tell you that Kansas State is the team he least likes to go up against. Not so much because they are a beast in college football – but they are good all the time, the Sooner coach acknowledges – but because of the high amount of respect he has for his former boss and mentor, Bill Snyder.
Stoops worked under Snyder at K-State for seven seasons through the mid-1990s as defensive backs coach and defensive coordinator. Before that, Snyder was an assistant coach at Iowa when Stoops played there as a defensive back.
So these two go back quite a few years, which is a big reason Stoops does not enjoy having to coach against his former coach and good friend.
That has happened a total of 11 times since Stoops took his first head-coaching job at Oklahoma in 1999 after serving as an assistant for close to a decade and a half, with stops at Iowa, Kent State, Kansas State and Florida.
The Sooner head coach may not like coaching against Snyder, but he would certainly like it much less if he hadn’t been as successful as he has against his old team. And it isn’t just his old team, but also that of his brother, Mike, the OU defensive coordinator, who served in that same capacity under Snyder from 1996-98 before joining brother Bob at Oklahoma.
Stoops owns an 8-3 record against his former boss. Two of the three losses came the last two times Kansas State came to Norman. Before that, the Stoops’ Sooners were 8-1 against the Wildcats, with the one loss occurring in the 2003 Big 12 Championship game.
Oklahoma has done well in games with K-State during the Snyder-Stoops era, which began in 2000, Stoops’ second season in Norman, and has continued on a semi-regular basis right up to the present, with a brief three-year hiatus from 2006-08 after Snyder retired the first time.
From 1999 to 2010, the two schools played every third and fourth year because of the 12-team divisional alignment in the Big 12. When the conference was reduced to 10 teams, the football schedule changed to a round-robin format, under which the Sooners and Wildcats meet every year.
Here are four games I believe to be the biggest, or most memorable, between Kansas State and Oklahoma during the time that Bob Stoops and Bill Snyder, the two winningest coaches in the Big 12 era, have been on the respective sidelines: