Oklahoma football: Alabama, Clemson? Bring on all comers!

Ever since the 1950s, when Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma football teams first became recognized as a national football power, the Sooners have never shied away from going toe to toe against the best the game can offer.

Wins and losses is the ultimate measure of a team’s success, but in the College Football Playoff era, and even before that, in a sport in which the entire regular season schedule consists of just a dozen games, it also matters who you play, who those teams play and how well they do, as well as where you play.

Great teams and their coaches know that to be considered the best, you have to be willing to play and beat the best. With conference structures and schedules the way the are today, teams only play three or four games every year against teams outside of their conference.

It was not unusual in days gone by for some teams to schedule so-called cupcake opponents in the nonconference portion of their schedule in an effort to pad their win totals before having to go up against tougher competition in conference play. The Oklahoma athletic directors and head coaches have never been ones to adopt that scheduling philosophy.

With the new age emphasis on strength of schedule as a key factor in the College Football Playoff rankings and determining which teams receive the prime bowl assignments, the Big 12, along with the other Power Five conferences, requires its member teams to schedule at least one nonconference opponent from another Power Five league or Notre Dame every season.

This may be new to some, but it is nothing new to the Oklahoma football program. Scheduling competitive nonconference games is ingrained in the Sooner football DNA and has been for well over half a century.

In the past two weeks, Oklahoma has announced future two-game, home-and-home series with current powerhouse programs Clemson and Alabama. Games with both teams have been scheduled out as far as 13 to 17 years from now. That’s how far out you must go to find mutually acceptable dates for potential blockbuster matchups such as these.

Of course, the problem in scheduling these games so far out is you don’t know what kind of teams they will be that far out. Historically, though, you can generally count on elite programs like OU or Bama to be highly competitive regardless of the year.

Oklahoma Sooners Football

Bud Wilkinson’s OU teams of the 1950s and ’60s  normally played a 10-game schedule (11 when they were eligible for postseason play). That left three or four nonconference games every season. Between 1953 and 1960, the Sooners opened the season in six of the eight years against a top-25 opponent, and none of those teams was Texas, which Oklahoma has played practically every season since 1900, long before the two teams became members of the same conference (when the Big 12 was formed in 1996).

Texas was a ranked team nearly every season that Wilkinson’s teams played them. Wilkinson also played Notre Dame five times between 1953 and 1962.

Barry Switzer’s OU teams also played Texas every season (Switzer was 9-5-2 against the Longhorns). In addition, the Sooners played USC three times under Switzer as a nonconference opponent. On two of those occasions, the Trojans were ranked No. 1 in the land. Oklahoma also played Ohio State twice when the Buckeyes were ranked in the top 10 and Miami (Florida) as a No. 1-ranked team.

Texas was already a member of the Big 12 when Bob Stoops took over the head coaching duties in Norman, but he may have been the Sooners’ strongest advocate yet of scheduling big games outside of the conference. During Stoops’ 18-year tenure, OU played home-and-home series with UCLA, Alabama, Florida State, Notre Dame, Tennessee and the front-half of the recent two-game set with Ohio State.

Even while Stoops was still there, the OU athletic administration was busy scheduling a pair of future two-game series with longtime former conference rival Nebraska (2021-22 and 2029-30) and 2022), as well as future games with Tennessee (2020 and 2024) and Michigan (2025 and 2026).

Nowadays, in the weeks counting down to the final College Football Playoff rankings, with multiple teams possessing identical won-lost records, the conversation typically switches to strength of schedule as the deciding factor in who’s in and who’s out when all other things are considered equal.

When you play the best and beat the best, you have a valid claim to being recognized as one of the best. As long as Oklahoma continues to win 10 or 11 games a season and the Big 12 remains strong as a football conference, strength of schedule should never be a liability for the Sooners for the foreseeable future.