Saturday was the 12th time Oklahoma vs. Kansas State featured head coaches and close friends Bob Stoops and Bill Snyder on the respective sidelines.
Stoops has won nine of those encounters, but the games between the Sooners and the Wildcats have generally been much closer than the overall record would indicate. Two of the three wins by Kansas State while Stoops has been at Oklahoma have come the last two times Snyder brought his team to OU before Saturday.
The Sooners have never lost at K-State under Stoops. The OU head coach is 5-0 when he takes his team to Manhattan, Kan., where he spent seven seasons under Snyder as defensive backs coach and defensive coordinator. That is better than the 4-2 mark of the Sooners when they have hosted Kansas State in Norman in the 18 seasons that Stoops has headed the football program at Oklahoma.
Before Saturday’s win by the Sooners, Kansas State had prevailed in two consecutive trips to Oklahoma, but only by a combined five points. Oklahoma made sure it wasn’t that close on this trip south by the Wildcats, hammering K-State 38-17 in a game that was never really close.
As usual this season, there were a handful of Oklahoma stars on the offensive end, but for the second straight week, Sooner wide receiver Dede Westbrook was clearly at the top of the list.
It was Westbrook’s breakaway, 88-yard touchdown catch and dash to the end zone – one play after Kansas State had cut the Oklahoma lead to 14 points on a similar long pass hookup between Wildcat quarterback Joe Huebner and Dominique Heath – that sealed K-State’s fate and produced the first home win in this series since 2009.
Westbrook also caught TD passes of 26 and eight yards in the Sooners’ victory over Kansas State.
In his last three games – wins by Oklahoma over TCU, Texas and now Kansas State – Westbrook has caught 25 passes for a total of 574 yards and eight touchdowns. He is averaging a sensational 23 yards per catch. Those eight touchdowns represent half of Baker Mayfield’s 16 touchdown passes this season.
Westbrook caught only four touchdowns all last season, his first at Oklahoma. He did not catch his first touchdown pass this season until the Sooners’ fourth game of the season, at TCU. He mad up for lost time in that outing, though, hauling in three TD passes in leading the Sooners to a big win over the Horned Frogs.