Oklahoma football: Sooners’ relish tough nonconference tests

Oklahoma football has never been one to cakewalk its way into the season.

Scheduling easy games early may enable you to rack up the early wins, but it doesn’t do much to get you ready for much tougher competition once the conference schedule kicks in. Any confidence gained from beating inferior opponents could easily be misinterpreted as a false positive.

Playing quality opponents early in the season schedule is a high-risk, high-reward proposition for all teams, but especially those considered national title contenders. A victory over a ranked opponent pays dividends all season long; lose and your margin of error to remain in the championship hunt is reduced to virtually zero the remainder of the season.

Since 2000, Oklahoma has fashioned a regular-season record of 56-8 (.875) against nonconference opponents, and that includes wins over some of college football biggest brand names: Alabama, Notre Dame, Washington, Florida State and Ohio State.

The Sooners have been scheduling big-name opponents as part of the nonconference schedule long before the Big 12 and the other so-called Power Five conferences began requiring their member schools to play at least one of its nonconference games every season against a team from one of the other Power Five leagues or Notre Dame.

And this isn’t just a recent phenomenon for OU football. The Sooners have been scheduling formidable opposition outside of their conference dating all the way back to the Bud Wilkinson era, some 70 years ago. To begin with, Oklahoma and the Texas Longhorns have been playing each other annually for well over a century.

The Longhorns, one of the top five winningest college football programs of all time, own a 62-47 record against the Sooners and five of the games have ended in a tie. Since 1945, however, a span of 75 years, the two teams are dead even at 36 wins apiece along with three ties.

Bob Stoops, the winningest coach in Oklahoma’s storied gridiron history, on more than one occasion was heard championing the mantra: “To be the best, you have to beat the best.” And he did an excellent job of backing up those words of wisdom by playing and beating a number of nonconference teams associated with college football greatness in his 18 seasons at OU.

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Stoops’ Sooner teams were 50-8 in nonconference regular-season games, including a couple of wins over Alabama, and Florida State and victories over Washington, Oregon, UCLA and Notre Dame. Stoops didn’t win all of his games against teams from one of the four other major conferences, but he did win more than his fair share, including impressive bowl victories over Florida State, Alabama and Auburn.

Barry Switzer won 12 Big Eight Conference titles in 16 seasons and three national championships and has the best record against Texas (9-5-2) of all of the Sooner coaches in the modern era (1946 to the present). The Longhorns were a nonconference opponent during those years, and were ranked at the time of the annual OU-Texas game in most of those seasons. Switzer’s teams also played ranked Miami (Florida), Pittsburgh and Ohio State teams in home-and-home series.

USC was the one nonconference foe that always seemed to have the Sooners’ number while Switzer was at the helm Oklahoma and USC played four times between 1973 and 1988, and OU lost all four times, twice while the Trojans were ranked No. 1 in the nation. Switzer was 48-13 (.774) against nonconference regular-season opponents.

It may surprise some Sooner fans to learn that Wilkinson, whose great teams of the 1950s won an NCAA record 47 consecutive games,13 consecutive conference championships and three times were crowned national champions, was the worst of the three winningest Oklahoma head coaches, compiling a 35-18-1 .660) nonconference record.

Wilkinson’s kryptonite, in terms of nonconference teams that OU could not dominate like it did everyone else, was Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish were the last team to beat Oklahoma before the Sooners ran off 47 straight wins and the team that ended OU’s remarkable win streak four years later. All told, OU and Notre Dame played five times while Wilkinson was head coach. The Sooners won just one of those contests, a 40-0 rout in at Notre Dame in the 1956 championship season.

In the last several months, Sooner athletic director Joe Castiglione has finalized future home-and-home series with current college powerhouses Alabama, Georgia and Clemson. OU also has future series scheduled with former conference rival Nebraska, Michigan and Tennessee.

So the beat goes on for Oklahoma…playing and hopefully prevailing over the best in an effort to prove you’re one of, if not the best.

The Sooners’ 2019 nonconference schedule includes home dates with Houston, which upset Oklahoma two years ago in the season opener in Houston, and South Dakota. OU also will travel to Los Angeles the third weekend in Sept. to take on UCLA. Perhaps not as strong a schedule as in recent seasons, but that is the exception and not the norm.

Lincoln Riley is off to a strong start in his first two head-coaching seasons at OU. He’s 6-0 against nonconference opponents in the regular season, but 0-2 outside of the league in the postseason.