Oklahoma football: Another Sooner national championship is overdue

It’s been 19 years since the last Oklahoma football national championship.

Bob Stoops collected the Sooners seventh national championship hardware in 2000, his second season as the OU head coach. Quarterback Josh Heupel and top-ranked Oklahoma had to grind one out against No. 3 Florida State, but the Sooner defense dominated in a 13-2 OU victory.

Oklahoma has been close since then, but hasn’t been able to finish the job.

The 2000 national championship came 15 years after OU’s1985 national crown, which came 11 years after the 1974 championship. If you’re detecting a pattern here, you probably can surmise what’s coming next: Oklahoma is overdue for another successful climb to the summit of college football.

The gap between Oklahoma national championships appears to be getting larger, but after Bud Wilkinson won three national titles in a period of six seasons in the 1950s, it was 27 years before Barry Switzer’s 1973 team added another. And the 1974 OU team wasted little time in duplicating that effort the very next season.

Here we are lamenting about when the Sooners are going to win another national crown when, in reality, there are 100 or more FBS programs that would give almost anything to win just one.

Oklahoma has seven to its credit, spread out over four different decades. In the poll era, or since 1936, when the team that finished first in the final Associated Press poll and later the Coaches Poll was recognized as national champion, Oklahoma’s seven ranks as the third most, tied with USC.

Not all that surprising, Alabama, on the strength of five national championships in the last 10 years, stands No. 1 with 12 championships; Notre Dame is second with eight. Ohio State follows the Sooners, at six, and Nebraska and Miami (Florida) have won it all five times.

Those are the high rollers in the modern era of college football, but when you consider that 75 percent of all the teams that make up the Football Bowl Subdivision (or what used to be referred to as NCAA Division I) have never won a national title and probably never will, it underscores how difficult it is to win one national championship, let alone multiple titles.

Michigan is one of the oldest college programs and the winningest team of all-time. Yet the Wolverines have been crowned national champs just twice in the poll era. Penn State and Tennessee have just two, and Georgia and UCLA just one.

It’s hard to win a national championship in any sport, and at the highest level of college football, the pinnacle has been dominated by about a dozen schools.

It’s been 19 years since OU’s national championship celebration over Florida State in the Orange Bowl, but the Sooners have actually been in a position to add several more since then.

Between 1998 and 2013, the Bowl Championship Series format was put in place as a means of determining the top two teams that would play for the national championship. The final selection was based on a compilation of the human polls and several computer models.

Oklahoma was awarded the top seed in the 2000 BCS standings. Florida State earned the No. 2 spot opposite the Sooners despite finishing third in the human polls.

The Sooners made it back to the BCS Championship Game in the 2003 season, again as the No. 1 seed, facing No. 2 LSU. OU wasn’t able to finish the job, however, losing 21-14.

In 2004, USC and Oklahoma went virtually wire to wire as the No. 1 and No. 2 teams, respectively and faced each other in the BCS Championship game that season. The two teams might have been neck and neck in the polls, but that wasn’t the case in the national title showdown, as USC handed Bob Stoops one of his worst losses as the OU head coach.

The Sooners scored first, taking the opening kickoff down the field for an early TD, but USC scored 55 of the next 58 points in a 55-19 runaway.

Four years later, it was Oklahoma and Florida playing for the national championship in a game that pitted 2008 Heisman Trophy winner Sam Bradford and the Sooners against 2007 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow. The Sooners ended up a bridesmaid again, falling 24-14 to the Gators.

Oklahoma did not make it to the championship game in the final five years of the BCS era, but the four appearances the Sooners did make in the BCS National Championship tied Florida State for the most of any team.

The Bowl Championship Series was replaced by a four-team College Football Playoff to determine the national champion, beginning in the 2014 season. The Sooners have made it into the Playoff in three of the five years since the new format was introduced, the only Big 12 team to do so, but they have yet to make it past the semifinal round.

OU lost to Clemson in 2015, to Georgia in double overtime in 2017, and to Alabama last season.

Circling back to the original premise of this article, it has been a long time between national titles for Oklahoma — nearly two decades — but the Sooners have played in three other national championship games since then and were within one win of playing in three more.

So, six opportunities lost. Do you think there might be a few teams and several million fans that won’t have a shred of sympathy for the Sooners?

Overdue? Maybe. But to be brutally blunt. Oklahoma has to finish off the opportunities it is given. And they’ve had more than their share the past 19 years.