Oklahoma football: The 50-year anniversary of the famed ‘Wishbone’

Eras in Oklahoma football, as in all of the college game, are defined and remembered for game-changing innovations as the teams, coaches and players who excel and achieve extraordinary success putting them into practice.

The Oklahoma teams under head coach Bud Wilkinson in the 1950s were masters of the Split-T offense. The Sooners weren’t the originators of the Split-T offense. but Wilkinson and Oklahoma were the ones that executed it to near perfection and are most closely associated with its success.

Oklahoma won 93 games, including three national championships, and lost just 10 times in the decade of the 1950s. That was 13 more wins than the next closest team and the best record of any team in the country during that period.

Similarly, Barry Switzer’s teams in the 1970s ushered in an exciting Renaissance era in Oklahoma football, running an explosive, new, triple-option offense out of a formation termed the Wishbone.

The exciting, new offensive system was initially conceived at the high school level in Texas in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a man named Emory Bellard, and made its way to the college level when Bellard became an assistant at the University of Texas.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wishbone offense in college football, one of the most iconic and explosive offenses to be introduced to the college game.

In the spring of 1967, Texas head coach Darrell Royal, an OU alum and First-Team All-American quarterback at Oklahoma in the late 1940s, added Bellard to the Longhorn coaching staff. While a high school coach in San Angelo, Texas, Bellard created a variation of the Split-T offense (the most popular football formation at the time) that moved the fullback a couple of steps ahead of the two halfbacks. This produced a multiple-option offensive set that looked like a “Y,” and quickly became known as the Wishbone formation.

Although you could pass the ball out of the Wishbone, it is designed primarily to run the football, keeping defenses guessing who, out of four offensive backfield players, who will end up carrying the football. The formation attempts to eliminate two defenders from the play, thus setting up additional blockers to lead the player carrying the ball.

Royal promoted Bellard to offensive coordinator and asked him to change the Texas offense by incorporating the Wishbone. From 1968 to 1970, Texas experienced extraordinary success operating out of the Wishbone, winning 30 of 33 games and two national championships (1969 and 1970).

Oklahoma Sooners Football

Meanwhile, the rest of the college football world was taking notice, including the coaching staff at longtime Red River rival Oklahoma.

It was not unusual then for Royal and his staff to share information about the dynamic new offensive system with other coaches, but to do so with the staff at Oklahoma was highly out of the ordinary.

In his informative and entertaining book, “Wishbone: Oklahoma Football, 1959-1985,” Wann Smith offers an interesting story told to him by Bellard:

"“One day, Darrell comes into my office and said, ‘Chuck Fairbanks (head coach at OU from 1967-72) and his coaches are in bad shape up in Oklahoma. They’re fixin’ to get fired. I want to help him. Barry Switzer will be calling you to learn about the Wishbone.’“I was stunned for a moment,” Bellard explained, “and then managed to reply, ‘You’ve got to be joking,” but he wasn’t. So Barry called me on several occasions, and I gave him all our knowledge about the formation. And within a year or so, we couldn’t catch ’em; they (Oklahoma) had too much speed and talent.“In retrospect, I doubt Darrell would have been nearly as benevolent if he had it to do over again.”"

The Sooners were using the Houston Veer offense in 1970. After losing to Oregon State in their third game that season, Switzer, who was then the OU offensive coordinator, convinced Chuck Fairbanks to let him install the Wishbone offense for the annual Texas game, a very risky and arduous changeover to employ in the middle of a season.

Switzer knew that with the talent and speed Oklahoma had on its roster, the Wishbone would give the Sooners a significant advantage over their opponents. But it would also take some time to work out the kinks and get everyone to the intricacies of the new offensive system.

"“With (Greg) Pruitt, (Joe) Wylie, (Roy) Bell and (Jack) Mildren in the backfield, he (Switzer) realized the Sooners would more closely represent a track team than a football backfield,” Smith wrote in his book."

The transformation took less than half a season, and the force and fury that had made Oklahoma such an incredible story in the 1950s was back in full force, with a revolutionary new wrinkle but the same wildly successful results.

From 1973 to 1980, OU compiled a record of 83-9-2 under Switzer’s leadership operating out of the Wishbone, including a 4-3-1 record vs. archrival Texas and 7-1 against Nebraska.

Switzer won 157 games in 16 seasons as OU head coach running the Wishbone offense, and his 102 victories in the decade of the ’70s was the most of any NCAA Division I team.

While the Wishbone served as the primary offensive design at Oklahoma throughout Switzer’s time as head coach, it had run its course by the time he stepped down in 1988.

Even today, as the game continues to change, schools are using variants of the triple-option in spread formations, and the full-blown Wishbone is still being employed with success at programs such as Air Force, Georgia Tech and Navy.

The Wishbone may have been invented in Texas, but it was immortalized at Oklahoma.