Oklahoma football: The calm before the storm 25 years ago

Oklahoma football was in a much different place 25 years ago.

Looking back almost three-quarters of a century, the 1990s stands out as the worst decade of Sooner football. The 1993 season was far from a disaster, with the Sooners posting an overall mark of 9-3 under head coach Gary Gibbs.

What will be remembered most about that season was it was the foreshadowing of an absolutely awful five years of Oklahoma football that came thereafter.

The Sooners were a pedestrian 6-6 in 1994, Gibbs final season as head coach, and won four of seven games against Big Eight opponents. Although he put together a respectable 44-23-2 record in six seasons after replacing Barry Switzer, Gibbs was fired after the 1994 season, not so much because of his overall record but because he couldn’t win games against the Sooners biggest rivals at the time. Oklahoma was just 2-15-1 in games against Texas, Nebraska and Colorado.

On a positive side, though, Oklahoma never lost to Oklahoma State while Gibbs was head coach.

Gibbs was replaced by Howard Schnellenberger, who won a national championship coaching the Miami (Florida) Hurricanes in 1983, but he will go down as one of the worst head coach hires in Sooner football history, lasting just one season.  John Blake, who like Gibbs was an OU alum and former player, was the next man up in the line of Sooner head coaches.

In the four seasons before Bob Stoops arrived on the scene to turn around a team in disrepair, Schnellenberger and Blake combined to produce a record of 17-27-1 and a very un-Oklahoma-like 10-21 in conference games.

Oklahoma opened up the 1993 campaign with five consecutive wins, including a win over Texas, the only time a Gibbs team would beat the Longhorns in six trips to Dallas. The Sooners found the going much tougher the second half of the season, going 4-3 with losses to Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas State.

The 1993 loss to Kansas State was especially painful, given that Oklahoma had not lost to the Wildcats in the 22 previous seasons. Bill Snyder was in his fifth season coaching at K-State. Interestingly, the Sooners would not register another win over Kansas State until Bob Stoops, a former K-State assistant, arrived at Oklahoma, some seven seasons later.

The 1993 edition of Oklahoma football featured a balanced offense led by senior Cale Gundy at quarterback. The Sooners averaged 194 yards on the ground, 192 passing yards and 29.8 points per game, according to sports-reference.com, far below the high-octane Oklahoma offenses of today.

The 19th-ranked Sooners capped off the 1993 season with a 41-10 victory in the John Hancock Bowl over Texas Tech, which three years later would become a member of the newly formed Big 12.

Gibbs led Oklahoma to three postseason bowl appearances (1991 Gator Bowl, 1993 John Hancock Bowl and the 1994 Copper Bowl), winning two of the three.

Statistical information in this article was obtained from the 2018 Oklahoma Football Media Guide.