Oklahoma Football: Sugar Bowl Fun Fact No. 3
By Chip Rouse
An Oklahoma football team has appeared in the Sugar Bowl seven previous times in the school’s history. On Jan. 2 the Sooners will make their eighth Sugar Bowl appearance.
To commemorate that situation, we have come up with eight different fun facts about OU and the Sugar Bowl that we are sharing in the days counting down to Oklahoma’s 2017 postseason kickoff.
Although Oklahoma has seemingly had a toll-tag pass to the Orange Bowl in Miami ever since the Sooners went to South Florida for their very first postseason bowl appearance in 1939 (they were shutout by Tennessee in that game, 17-0), the bowl site to which they have made the second most visits all-time is the Sugar Bowl.
The Sooners have played in the Orange Bowl 19 times, largely because of the longtime contract that bowl had with the Big Eight that secured a spot for the conference champion.
On Jan. 2, Oklahoma will make its eighth appearance in the Sugar Bowl, where the Sooners also own their second best bowl record with five wins in seven previous games.
In the late Bud Wilkinson’s first five seasons as the head coach at Oklahoma, he took the Sooners to bowl games in four of those five seasons, including three consecutive trips to the Sugar Bowl in 1949, ’50 and ’51 (in the 1948-50 seasons). OU was a combined 31-2 in those three seasons and never lost a Big Seven Conference game. The 1950 Sooners were national champions for the first time in school history.
As good as those Sooner teams were from 1948-50, they won just two of their three bowl games. And the game they lost was in their national championship season.
Oklahoma defeated North Carolina 14-6 in its very first Sugar Bowl appearance in a game in which each team totaled just over 200 yards of total offense, a far cry from the offensive output of today’s college teams.
The next season, in Oklahoma’s national championship year, the Sooners and LSU (Louisiana State in those days) played to a scoreless first-quarter deadlock in the Sugar Bowl. After the first 15 minutes, however, the Sooners put their engine into high gear, scoring the next 35 unanswered points en route to a dominating 35-0 victory.
Oklahoma came into the 1951 Sugar Bowl on the heels of 31 consecutive wins and a 10-0 regular-season record. Five fumbles put the Sooners in a first-half hole they were unable to overcome as legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s seventh-ranked Kentucky Wildcats build a 13-0 halftime lead and went on to defeat the No. 1-ranked Sooners by a score of 13-7.
Next: Oklahoma Sugar Bowl Fun Fact No. 2
Even though the 1950 Oklahoma team lost in the Sugar Bowl to Kentucky, OU retained its No. 1 Associated Press ranking for the season and was awarded the national championship.