Oklahoma football: Three of Sooners’ 6 Heismans have been in last 14 years
By Chip Rouse
This has been a huge award season for Oklahoma football, and the biggest prize of all – the national championship – is still out there for the taking.
The Sooners laid claim to their 11th conference championship, and third in succession, since the Big 12 was formed back in 1996, and are headed to the College Football Playoff for the second time in the four seasons since the new national championship format was established in 2014.
On Saturday, Baker Mayfield became the sixth Oklahoma player, and third Sooner quarterback, to win the Heisman Trophy, presented every year for the past 83 seasons to college football’s most outstanding player.
It was 18 seasons before Oklahoma had its first Heisman recipient. Billy Vessels was one of many great Sooner All-Americans who played under legendary head coach Bud Wilkinson, but he was the only one to win the Heisman Trophy, which he did his senior year in 1952. Seventeen more seasons passed before OU produced its second Heisman winner. Steve Owens, a running back who played under Chuck Fairbanks, is fourth on the OU career rushing list, won the award in 1969.
Nine years later, perhaps the greatest of all the Oklahoma running backs, Billy Sims, won the award, playing for Barry Switzer. Sims finished second in the Heisman voting the following year, losing out to Charles White of USC.
Ironically, both Owens and Sims were first-round selections of the NFL Detroit Lions.
Another 25 years would pass before OU would claim its fourth Heisman winner. Quarterback Jason White won the Heisman in 2003, his redshirt junior season. White was recruited and coached by Bob Stoops, and made the trip to New York City again in 2004. He finished third in the voting in 2004, behind teammate Adrian Peterson and the Heisman winner, Matt Leinart of USC.
White and Leinart were the quarterbacks for OU and USC when those two teams met for the BCS National Championship in the Orange Bowl in January 2005. That was a game that the Sooners would rather forget, as Leinart and USC demolished Oklahoma to the tune of 55-19. Both teams entered the game with perfect 12-0 records.
Sam Bradford won the Heisman in 2008, a second QB under Stoops to do so, leading the Sooners to the Big 12 championship and an appearance in the BCS National Championship facing Florida and the 2007 Heisman winner Tim Tebow. Florida, coached at the time by Urban Meyer, prevailed in the BCS Championship that season, defeating the Sooners 24-14.
That brings us to Mayfield’s Heisman coronation and induction into college football’s most exclusive club on Saturday. This was the OU quarterback’s third consecutive trip to New York as a Heisman finalist. He was fourth in the voting in 2015 and third a year ago. This time, however, he was a landslide winner, receiving 86 percent of the votes.
Bob Stoops was in attendance at the ceremony, but this time not as the Sooners’ coach but as the former coach, a valued friend and mentor and big supporter of Mayfield’s rise to the top of the college football world.
Lincoln Riley, who became the OU offensive coordinator in 2015, the same time that Mayfield won the starting quarterback job at Oklahoma, was at the ceremony this year as Mayfield’s head coach, having taken the head coaching job this season after Stoops announced his retirement this past spring. Outside of his family, Mayfield doesn’t have any bigger supporter than Riley.
The record shows that Oklahoma now has six Heisman winners, who played under five coaches. The last three of those, all quarterbacks, have come in the past 14 seasons.
Stoops, Oklahoma’s winningest head coach, is the only one, however, to coach two Heisman Trophy winners, and three if you count the two years he was head coach with Mayfield as the starting quarterback.
There are nine coaches, including Stoops, who have had two players win the Heisman Trophy, according to due diligence performed by Oklahoma City Oklahoman sports columnist Berry Tramel. Only three coaches, however, have had as many as three Heisman winners: Frank Leahy (4): Angelo Bertelli, 1943; Johnny Lujack, 1947; Leon Hart, 1949, and Johnny Lattner, 1953. Red Blaik of Army (3): Doc Blanchard, 1945; Glenn Davis, 1946; Pete Dawkins, 1958. Pete Carroll of USC (3): Carson Palmer, 2002; Matt Leinart, 2004; Reggie Bush, 2005 (since vacated by the New York Downtown Athletic Club because of NCAA rules violations by Bush).