Oklahoma football: 50 years ago, OU won a Heisman but just 6 games

Fifty years ago this season an Oklahoma football player won the Heisman, but the Sooners themselves won just a half-dozen games.

Oklahoma won a Big Eight championship under head coach Chuck Fairbanks in 1968, with a 6-1 conference record and 7-4 overall, but the very next season, in 1969, the Sooners suffered three of their four overall losses against Big Eight foes and finished in fourth place in the league.

A 6-4 season record would be considered a good year by many college teams, but not so at Oklahoma, whose 652 wins and .767 winning percentage since 1946 is the best in NCAA Division I football. Since the end of World War II, considered the modern era of college football, the Sooners have lost six or more games in a season just 10 times in 73 seasons, and five of those seasons fell between 1994 and 1998 under three different head coaches.

The Sooners’ 6-4 season in 1969 certainly was not a losing one — Oklahoma has had only three losing seasons in the last 73 years — but it was the second worst record for OU football in the decade of the 1960s, the fourth worst decade, in terms of winning percentage, in 13 total decades of Sooner football.

Oklahoma kicked off the 1969 season as the nation’s sixth-ranked team, on the road at Wisconsin of the Big Ten. The Sooners left Camp Randall Stadium with a four-touchdown 48-21 victory. They returned home the following weekend and defeated an unranked Pittsburgh Panthers team by the comfortable margin of 37-8.

Then came the annual Red River Rivalry game with Texas. The Sooners came into that game ranked No. 8 in the country, but the Longhorns were at No. 2 and played like it in defeating their longtime rivals from the neighboring state north of the Red River, winning 27-17. The loss was OU’s first of the season, but it ended up establishing a perplexing pattern that would continue through the Big Eight portion of the schedule and for the remainder of season.

The Sooners dropped four spots, to No. 12, in the Associated Press Top 25 after losing to Texas, but rebounded a week later with a 42-30 win at home over Colorado. That was followed by one of the worst Oklahoma losses in the modern era of college football. The Sooners were absolutely annihilated by Kansas State and future NFL quarterback Lynn Dickey.

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K-State opened up a 28-14 halftime lead and outscored OU 31-7 in the second half for a 59-21 victory. Dickey lead the Kansas State offense, which exploded for 535 total yards on the Sooner offense, 380 of that through the air.

The next four games on the schedule resulted in an Oklahoma win followed by a loss. The Sooners alternated wins over Iowa State and Kansas with losses to Missouri and Nebraska.

The final game of the regular season was a Bedlam finale at Oklahoma State. As it turned out, this would be senior running back Steve Owens’ final college game because the Sooners did not play in a bowl game, the only time in Fairbanks’ five seasons as head coach that OU did not make a postseason appearance.

The unanimous First-Team All-American made the most of his final game in a Sooner uniform. He carried the ball what was then an NCAA-record 55 times, gaining 261 yards behind stellar blocking and outstanding OU offensive line play. Oklahoma held on for a 28-27 win over its in-state rival.

The 1969 season was not one to celebrate by historical Oklahoma football standards, but it did produce something very special: the Sooners’ second Heisman Trophy winner.

Owens rushed for 1,523 yards and 23 touchdowns his senior season, earning him college football most prestigious individual honor. He won out over a list of Heisman candidates that included quarterbacks Mike Phipps of Purdue, Rex Kern of Ohio State, Archie Manning of Ole Miss and Jim Plunkett of Stanford.

Owens was the second of what has now grown to seven Oklahoma Heisman winners. Billy Vessels was the first Sooner to be awarded the Heisman, in1952.

Six Sooner players from the 1969 team, including Owens, were selected in the 1970 NFL Draft. Three of the six (tight end Steve Zabel, linebacker Jim Files and Owens), were taken in the first round. Owens was selected by the Detroit Lions with the 19th overall pick. He played five seasons with the Lions before a serious of injuries forced his retirement.