Bud Wilkinson’s 1950s Sooner teams were virtually unbeatable
By Chip Rouse
The countdown continues: After a painstakingly long eight-month wait, we’re now at four days and counting before the kickoff of the 2018 Oklahoma football season.
In today’s countdown week feature, we look back at the incredible opening years of Bud Wilkinson’s great Oklahoma teams of the late 1940s and 1950s.
Lincoln Riley won a record 12 games last season in his first year as head coach of the Oklahoma Sooners.
Much has been made of Riley’s young age (he was the youngest head coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), at 33, when he assumed the top football post at OU), but Wilkinson was just 31 In his first season, in 1947. That Sooner team started off 2-2-1 before closing out with five consecutive wins.
Oklahoma lost its 1948 season opener at Santa Clara (California). Over the next 10 seasons and 100 games, however, the Sooners reeled off incredible winning streaks of 31 and 47 games and compiled an unbelievable overall record of 94 wins, just four losses and two ties. That’s a winning percentage of .950.
The 47-game winning streak, which extended from the third game of the 1953 season until the eighth game of the 1957 season, still stands as an NCAA record and is one that may never be equaled.
Ironically, Oklahoma’s last loss before embarking on its 47-game win streak, was in the 1953 season opener to Notre Dame, the same team that ended the remarkable string of victories four years later, in 1957, winning 7-0, again in Norman. The season before, in 1956, Oklahoma walloped the Fighting Irish in South Bend, Indiana, to the tune of 40-0.
Perhaps the Sports Illustrated cover jinx was responsible for the Sooners’ unbeatable streak ending at 47 games. The week before the Oklahoma-Notre Dame game in 1957, the Sports Illustrated cover featured Sooner halfback Clendon Thomas on the cover with the headline: “Why Oklahoma is Unbeatable.”
OU won five consecutive games after the Notre Dame loss before losing to Texas by a single point in the fourth game of the 1958 season. Otherwise, we might have seen a win streak approaching baseball’s Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. Had the Sooners’ not lost to Notre Dame in 1957, it would have marked four consecutive undefeated seasons and the epic win streak would have reached 53 games.
It’s hard to imagine any team winning 94 of 100 games in the world of college football as we know it today. Nick Saban’s Alabama teams of the past 10 seasons have come the closest, winning 125 and losing just 14, a winning percentage of .900, from 2008 through last season. The 2008 season was Saban’s second at Alabama. His team finished 12-2 that season, including an 8-0 record in the SEC.
The advantage that current day Alabama has over the great Oklahoma teams of the 1950s is in the number of national championships. The Crimson Tide have won five national titles in football in the 10 seasons since 2008. The Sooners won three national crowns during a comparable 10-year period in the 1950s.
While Wilkinson orchestrated 47 and 31-game winning streaks while at Oklahoma (the Sooners also won 28 games in a row under Barry Switzer between 1973-75), Alabama’s longest win streak with Saban at the helm has been 26 games, from 2015-16. Still an impressive achievement, given the greater overall parity in today’s game.
Clemson’s 35-31 win over the Crimson Tide in the 2016 College Football Playoff championship game snapped Bama’s 26-game win streak. Alabama won 11 consecutive games after the loss to Clemson, so what ended at 26 could just as easily been 38 under different circumstances.
Two great coaching runs, with a series of great teams from two different eras. Lincoln Riley is hoping to establish a coaching legacy of his own as he begins his second season as head coach and fourth at Oklahoma when the Sooners open up the 2018 campaign on Saturday at home against Florida Atlantic University.