On Sept. 1, the Sooners will kick off of the 124th season of Oklahoma football and the second full season under head coach Lincoln Riley.
None of Oklahoma’s 21 previous head coaches won as many games as Riley did (12) in their inaugural season on the Sooner sidelines.
Since the end of World War II, widely considered the beginning of the modern era of college football, no NCAA Division I or FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) team has won more games than the Sooners. From 1946 to the present, Oklahoma has won 640 games. To put that into perspective, that is 45 more games than the closest challenger (Alabama and Ohio State are next in line with 595 wins each) over that time frame.
Oklahoma will begin the 2018 campaign ranked in the top 10 in nearly every preseason poll after finishing No. 3 nationally the year before. Riley’s 2018 recruiting class, his first as OU head coach, ranked in the top-10 with one five-star and 14 four-star recruits.
Oklahoma Sooners Football
The Sooners return 6 starters on both sides of the ball, but will start the season with a new quarterback for the first time in three seasons. In the offseason, Riley added two new assistant coaches and a new strength and condition coach.
Here are some more notable numbers you should know about the 2018 Oklahoma Sooners going into the 2018 season:
2 – Of the 13 scholarship players who are defensive backs on the 2018 OU football team, only two are seniors and two more are juniors. The remaining nine are either freshmen or sophomores.
4 – The Sooners have won three consecutive Big 12 championships. If they are successful again in 2018, they would be the first team from a Power Five conference to win four straight conference titles since the Florida Gators did it from 1993-96.
7 – Number of Oklahoma home games on the 2018 schedule, the most since the 2007 season.
31.5 – Percentage of their total offense that the Sooners return in 2018 due largely to the departure of Baker Mayfield. The good news is that OU returns 70.1 percent of its rushing yards and 58.5 percent of its receiving yards and 68.4 percent of its scoring offense.
33 – Where Rodney Anderson ranks among the all-time Oklahoma rushing leaders. If he has a comparable season to the 1,161 yards he logged last season, he could pass as many as 11 former Sooner stars on the career list, including, Joe Mixon, Leon Crosswhite, Thomas Lott, Billy Vessels and Clendon Thomas.
103 – Number of career starts for the returning OU offensive linemen.
113 – This season marks the 113th renewal of the Oklahoma-Texas football rivalry currently billed as the Red River Showdown.
1912 – The OU-Texas football rivalry has been played in Dallas every season since 1912 with just three exceptions (Houston in 1913, Norman in 1922 and Austin in 1923).