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Oklahoma football: Sooners closing in on the 4th best decade in team history

By Chip Rouse

NORMAN, OK - OCTOBER 27: The Oklahoma Sooners take the field before the game against the Kansas State Wildcats at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on October 27, 2018 in Norman, Oklahoma. Oklahoma defeated Kansas State 51-14. (Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***
NORMAN, OK - OCTOBER 27: The Oklahoma Sooners take the field before the game against the Kansas State Wildcats at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on October 27, 2018 in Norman, Oklahoma. Oklahoma defeated Kansas State 51-14. (Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images) *** Local Caption *** /
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The 2019 season marks the 125th year of Oklahoma football.

The Sooners played their first game of varsity football in 1895, taking on a town team from Oklahoma City. It wasn’t much of a game, really, as the group of Oklahoma City players hung a 34-0 defeat on the upstart collegians from Norman.

Since then, the University of Oklahoma has played 1,274 games, winning 896 of them, the eighth most in college football, with 325 losses and 53 games ending in a tie.

The Sooners’ 896 all-time wins are 57 fewer than Michigan, the winningest college program with 953 wins. The Wolverines, however, played their first collegiate game 16 years earlier than Oklahoma. OU is just one behind both Nebraska and Notre Dame on the all-time win list and nine back of No. 5 Alabama.

Since the end of World War II (1946-2018), no college team has won more games than Oklahoma’s 652. That’s 43 more than the closest challenger over that time, Alabama, with 609.

Since 2010, the Sooners are 97-23, a winning percentage of .808. At that pace, Oklahoma would finish the decade with 109 wins and an .813 winning percentage.

If you break down the OU football history into decades, the 2010s will go down as the second best in terms of total wins and fourth in winning percentage.

Bob Stoops’ teams from 2000 to 2009 posted a record of 110-24, the most of any OU decade, beginning with the 1890s. The .821 winning percentage in the 2000s decade, however, was only the third best in program history.

Barry Switzer’s OU teams of the 1970s won 102 games (102-13-3). The .877 Sooner winning percentage in the 1970s is only the second best, though, in 13 decades of Oklahoma football.

The top honor in winning percentage by decade belongs to Bud Wilkinson’s outstanding Oklahoma teams of the 1950s. Those teams produced a 10-year record of 93-10-2 and an .895 winning percentage, including three national championships (1950, ’55 and ’56), 10 consecutive conference titles and a record 47-game winning streak.

The accomplishments of the 1950s Oklahoma Sooners teams likely will never be broken, but they will forever stand as a high-water mark for future Sooner decade teams to shoot for, if not all of college football.

Information that appears in this article was extracted, in part, from the 2018 Oklahoma Football Media Guide.

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