Oklahoma football: Sooners are college football’s best road team
By Chip Rouse
With more conference championships than home losses in the past 19 seasons, Oklahoma football has been one of the college game’s best at protecting its home turf.
Playing before 116 consecutive sellouts, the Sooners have fashioned a home record of 106-10 at Gaylord Family– Oklahoma Memorial Stadium since 1999, the season that Bob Stoops debuted as head coach. Seven of those 10 losses have come in the past six seasons.
In Stoops’ first 13 seasons as head coach (1999-2011), the Sooners lost just three times in 74 home games, including a string of 39 consecutive home wins.
As dominant as Oklahoma has been when playing at home, however, in the last four seasons, the Sooners own an even better record when playing away from home. OU is 18-1 in true road games (games away from home but not at neutral sites) since 2013. The lone stumble was a four-point loss at TCU in 2014.
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That is the best record in the country over that four-year period (or since the beginning of the College Football Playoff format)in true road contests. Ohio State and Wisconsin both have 17 wins in true road games over that same period.
Over those same four years, the Sooners were 18-5 playing at home. Among OU’s 18 true road wins since the beginning of the 2014 season, are victories at Tennessee and Ohio State, both of which were ranked at the time the game was played. The Sooners are 15-1 in the last four seasons in true road games against Big 12 foes.
In the last six seasons, Oklahoma is 27-2 in true road games, still better than the 28-8 record at home.
One caveat about Oklahoma’s road success, as sports columnist Berry Tramel points out in today’s edition of the Oklahoma City Oklahoman, the Big 12’s nine-game league schedule allows for more road wins than in other conferences, like the SEC and ACC, which play eight-game conference schedules.
Also, one of the Sooners toughest games away from home every year is the annual rivalry game with Texas, played at a neutral site, at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, approximately equidistance between the two campuses.
No matter how you slice it, Oklahoma has proved over the past six seasons that it is even more difficult to beat on the road than it is playing at home, where the Sooners have lost just 10 times in nearly two decades.