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Oklahoma football: Sooners’ 5 best Big 12 Championship wins

By Chip Rouse

ARLINGTON, TX - DECEMBER 02: The Oklahoma Sooners pose for a team photo after winning the Big 12 Championship against the TCU Horned Frogs 41-17 at AT
ARLINGTON, TX - DECEMBER 02: The Oklahoma Sooners pose for a team photo after winning the Big 12 Championship against the TCU Horned Frogs 41-17 at AT /
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GLENDALE, AZ – JANUARY 01: Head coach Bob Stoops has a Gatorade bucket dumped on him by Eric Mensik #69 late in the fourth quarter before the Sooners 48-20 victory against the Connecticut Huskies during the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl at the Universtity of Phoenix Stadium on January 1, 2011 in Glendale, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
GLENDALE, AZ – JANUARY 01: Head coach Bob Stoops has a Gatorade bucket dumped on him by Eric Mensik #69 late in the fourth quarter before the Sooners 48-20 victory against the Connecticut Huskies during the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl at the Universtity of Phoenix Stadium on January 1, 2011 in Glendale, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images) /

1  Dec. 2, 2000 — Oklahoma 27, Kansas State 24 in Kansas City, Mo.

The most gratifying of all 11 Oklahoma Big 12 Championships has to be the 2000 season. OU began that season, Bob Stoops second as the Sooners’ head coach. Oklahoma began the year at No. 19 in the Associated Press Top 25. By the fifth game of the season, the Sooners were at No. 10, and after destroying archrival Texas 63-14 and a 41-31 drubbing of No. 2 Kansas State they were at No. 3 and headed home to host No. 1 Nebraska.

The Oklahoma Air Raid offense, installed the season before by offensive coordinator Mike Leach was too much for the top-ranked Cornhuskers. The Sooners erased a 14-0 Nebraska start, shutting down the Huskers after the first quarter and scoring 31 unanswered points in the second and third quarters for a 31-14 win that vaulted OU to the top of the rankings for the first time since the late 1980s.

The Sooners closed out the regular season undefeated and at No. 1, but they had to go up against a very good K-State team for the second time that season in order to claim the Big 12’s top prize. The score in the Big 12 Championship was tied at 10-10 at the half and 17-17 at the end of three quarters.

OU scored early in the fourth quarter on a 17-yard touchdown pass from Josh Heupel to Andre Woolfolk and added a 46-yard field goal by Tim Duncan, which proved to be the winning margin. Kansas State scored with six seconds to go in the game, but it wasn’t enough to swing the outcome as Oklahoma held on for a 27-24 victory in a very tightly contested game.

That win sent the Sooners to the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, where OU finished off a perfect season and a national championship with a 13-2 win over Florida State, handing Stoops a national title in just his second season as a head coach.

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