Oklahoma football: Serving up defensive shutouts more uncommon than ever
By Chip Rouse
We’ve been flashing back a lot in recent weeks, reflecting on the great Oklahoma football teams of the1950s under the leadership of legendary head coach Bud Wilkinson.
In researching some of the nuances in the college game that are noticeably different today than they were back in the mid-20th century, some 70 years ago, one of the things that struck me is how much more infrequent it is for defenses to hold an opponent scoreless for an entire game.
The last time Oklahoma served up a shutout on defense was 31 games ago, a 55-0 whitewashing of Kansas State in 2015, the week after the Sooners were upset 24-17 by Texas in the annual Red River rivalry game.
The Sooners came close twice last season, holding the University of Texas-El Paso to just seven points in the season opener and limiting hapless Kansas to just a field goal in a 41-3 beatdown that was overshadowed by Baker Mayfield’s trash talking and use of inappropriate hand gestures.
Shutouts were much more prevalent earlier in time
In the last 10 seasons, Oklahoma has shutout its opponent just five times. In Bob Stoops 18 seasons as head coach, his Sooner teams registered just 14 scoreless games on defense. There were several seasons under Stoops’ reign when OU posted two shutouts, and in 2009, three of the eight Sooner victories were by shutout.
By contrast in the 178 Oklahoma games coached by Wilkinson, from 1947 to 1963, the Sooners held their opponent scoreless in 44 of them. That means that an OU opponent failed to score in 25 percent or a one-fourth of all the games in the 17 seasons Wilkinson coached the Sooners.
Oklahoma shut out its opponent five times in three different seasons under Wilkinson (1949, 1955 and 1958) and six times in the Sooners’ 1956 national championship season. In both 1955 and again in 1962, the opponents failed to score on Oklahoma in four consecutive games.
That level of defense just doesn’t happen the way the college game is played today, which is one way to explain why their are fewer defensive shutouts.
What gives today?
It’s not so much that the defenses are worse today than they were back in the days of one-platoon football, but rather that the offenses, especially in the Big 12, are so much better, more sophisticated and more explosive. Also, teams put the ball in the air considerably more often today, and with greater efficiency, than they did back in the 1950s, and placekickers have stronger legs and are more accurate from 40-plus yards out more than at any time in the history of the game.
For another thing, when teams are leading by two or more touchdowns late in games today, you generally see backups on the field on defense, providing opponents with a better chance to put points on the board than they would against first-unit defenders.
Still, it is a remarkable contrast in the number of defensive shutouts we see today compared with what it was back in a time when college football was a much simpler game.
One thing that remains the same in college football, however, is: If you don’t score, you can’t win. And winning, today more than ever, is what the game is all about.