Oklahoma football: The Sooners’ 2018 bye week comes at ideal time
By Chip Rouse
In Bob Stoops 18 consecutive winning seasons heading up Oklahoma football, he was 17-1 in games that immediately followed the Red River rivalry with Texas.
Second-year Sooner head coach Lincoln Riley added to that win total last season with a 42-35 win at Kansas State the week after the Texas game, which Oklahoma also won.
Oklahoma has played Kansas State in each of the last four seasons the week after playing Texas. The Sooners were victorious over K-State in three of those four years, but in 2014, Bill Snyder’s Wildcats handed his former defensive assistant OU’s only loss following its annual rivalry showdown with Texas in the last 19 seasons.
And that loss to K-State came at OU (31-30), where the Sooners are virtually unbeatable, winners of 107 of their last 117 home games.
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In 2018, Kansas State is off the schedule following the OU-Texas game. That’s because they are the Sooners’ opponent the week before Oklahoma makes the annual trip across the Red River to take on the Longhorns.
Instead of squaring off with Kansas State following Texas this fall, OU will make a return trip to the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, where TCU will be the opponent. Only this season, the Sooners will get the week off between the rivalry game with Texas and road game at TCU.
This will be the first time since 2010 that Oklahoma has enjoyed a week off after the Texas game and only the second time in the last 18 seasons the schedule has fallen that way for the Sooners.
An argument can be made that the reason Oklahoma is 16-1 since 1999 in games played the very next week after the rivalry game with Texas is because they did not have the week off.
But the Sooners also prevailed, and in dominant fashion, the two times they did have a bye week before their next game. They defeated Texas A&M 51-6 in 1999, Stoops’ first season at Oklahoma, and hammered Iowa State 52-0 in 2010.