Oklahoma football: Betcha didn’t know this
By Chip Rouse
From 1953 to 1957, Oklahoma football won 47 consecutive games, an NCAA Division I record that is likely to stand for sometime to come, and perhaps in perpetuity.
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The Sooners’ 47-game win streak, during the Bud Wilkinson coaching era, covered more than 1,500 days and included three consecutive undefeated seasons and two national championships.
The Washington Huskies won 40 consecutive games back in the early years of the 20th century (1908-1914), and USC and the University of Miami (Florida) put together win streaks of 34 games at the beginning of the present century.
It was the Oklahoma teams of the 1950s that put the OU on the national map and established the Sooners as one of the elite teams in college football, a distinction that still rings true today, six decades later.
As great as Oklahoma football was in the 1970s under Barry Switzer (102 wins in the decade with only 13 losses), and as prolific as the Sooners were in the 18 seasons under Bob Stoops, who with 190 total wins is Oklahoma’s winningest football coach, 110 of which came in the opening decade of the 2000s, neither of those were the best decade of OU football in the so-called modern era (since World War II).
That bit of history belongs to Wilkinson’s Oklahoma teams, who were a remarkable 93-10-2 in the 10 years that comprised the 1950s. The Sooners won three national championships during that time and an unprecedented 10 consecutive Big Seven championships.
According to the NCAA record book, no team in college football had a better winning percentage in the decade of the 1950s than the Oklahoma Sooners. The Sooners .895 winning percentage during that time was 117 percentage points better than second-place Ole Miss (82-21-5. .778) and 129 points better than Michigan State (70-21-1, .766)
Chuck Fairbanks’ and Barry Switzer’s Sooners of the 1970s produced 102 victories, just 13 losses and five ties for a program-best .877 winning percentage. Fairbanks’ Oklahoma teams in 1970-72 compiled 29 wins to go with six loses and one game ending in a tie. The 1972 Sooners were Big Eight champions.
Switzer took over the reins in 1973 and did not lose a game until the ninth game of his third season at the helm. Those first three seasons under Switzer’s leadership, Oklahoma was a combined 32-2, including two national championships (1974 and ’75) and three Big Eight championships.
It was the celebrated Wishbone era of Oklahoma football, and under Switzer the Sooners piled up 73 wins, losing just seven time with three games ending in ties. His conference record was even better during that period: going 45-4, with seven straight Big Eight championships since taking over in 1973.
Oklahoma’s .895 winning percentage in the decade of the 1950s not only is the best in 13 decades of OU football, but represented the best of any Division I college team during that decade, according to historical records provided by the NCAA.
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For the record, Oklahoma also had the highest winning percentage of all college teams in the 1970s. The Sooners’ .877 winning percentage under the Fairbanks/Switzer teams of the 1970s was 14 percentage points better than Alabama (103-16-1, .863) and 29 points better than Michigan (96-16-3, .848).