This year is the Golden Anniversary of Oklahoma football as far as postseason bowl appearances are concerned.
Oklahoma’s first appearance in a postseason bowl game was in 1939. The Sooners, unbeaten and untied in the 1938 season under second-year head coach Tom Stidham, were matched up in the Orange Bowl with another unbeaten and untied team in the Tennessee Volunteers. OU came into the game ranked fourth in the nation, according to the Associated Press; Tennessee was the country’s No. 2 team that season.
The Sooners’ 10 regular-season victories in 1938 included a remarkable eight shutouts.
In a bit of an ironic twist, OU’s first bowl appearance ended up a shutout itself, only on this occasion it was the Sooners who registered the goose egg on the scoreboard. Tennessee prevailed in the 1939 Sugar Bowl by a count of 17-0.
That was long before most Sooner fans today are able to remember. You would have to be 78 years or older today to have even been alive at the time of that first Oklahoma bowl game.
Oklahoma has made 48 more bowl appearances since 1939, and the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2 will mark No. 50 all-time.
The Sooners are 28-20-1 in their 49 postseason bowl games. OU has gone bowling for 17 consecutive seasons under head coach Bob Stoops.
Although Stoops has done exceptionally well at Oklahoma in the win column, his record in bowl games is a sub-par 8-9. Four of those bowl games, however, have been for the national championship and one was a College Football Playoff game. Stoops’ Sooners are just 1-4 in those contests. The one victory is their 13-2 win over Florida State in the 2000 BCS National Championship in the Orange Bowl.
In Oklahoma’s 49 previous bowl games, there have been some outstanding games – 28 of them ending up with trophies for the good guys from Norman – but there also have been ones that fall into the category of “games Sooner fans would like to forget but likely will never get over.”
We’ve dusted off and called out five of the latter, certain to bring out the bah humbug in you ahead of the Sooner’s Golden Anniversary bowl game with Auburn: