Oklahoma football: Winning is in OU’s DNA and has been for a long, long time

In a recent article looking ahead to the start of the 2019 season, we touched upon the incredible Oklahoma football run of non-losing seasons.

At a minimum, winning more games than you lose is a fixture on every team’s list of goals at the start of every college football season. Elite teams, like the Sooners and the other perennial college powerhouses, have much higher annual aspirations, but winning games is the bottom line and the price of entry when it comes to defining both short- and long-term success at all levels of the sport.

Oklahoma has an all-time record of 896 wins, 325 losses and 53 games have ended in a tie. That record, amassed over 124 years of varsity football, represents a winning percentage of .724.

For those who may be math-challenged, that means the Sooners have averaged seven wins out of every 10 games they’ve played throughout their celebrated history. Only four other FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) teams have done better in the history of college football.

Seventy-two percent of those 896 all-time Oklahoma wins, or 652, have come since 1946, a period during which the Sooners have accumulated more victories than any other NCAA Division I or FBS school.

Only a dozen times in the history of Oklahoma Sooner football has an OU team lost more games in a season than it has won. That’s 12 times in 124 seasons. One of those 12 losing seasons was in the Sooners’ inaugural year, in 1895.

Back in those early days, a season might be only one or two games long. The OU football team played a town team from Oklahoma City that season — the only game Oklahoma would play that year. It was just as well because the OKC townies hammered the upstart Sooners by a score of 34-0.

Oklahoma did not have another losing season for 26 seasons thereafter (OU went 2-3-3 in 1922).

Of the four legendary Oklahoma coaches who are members of the Century Club (100 or more wins), Barry Switzer (16 seasons and No. 2 on the all-time wins list among Sooner head coaches) and Bob Stoops (18 seasons and the winningest OU head coach with 190 wins) never had a losing campaign; Bud Wilkinson (the third winningest coach in Sooner football history) had one losing season in 17 at Oklahoma, and Bennie Owen, who coached football, basketball and baseball in the early years at OU, suffered three losing seasons, all in succession (1922, ’23 and ’24), in 22 as head football coach.

Current head coach Lincoln Riley has continued the Sooners’ winning tradition. He has been in that role just two season, but already has etched his name in the record book. Riley’s 24 wins in his first two seasons is the most by any college head coach since 1892-93.

Oklahoma has 39 10-win seasons in its history and 25 11-win seasons. Both of those marks lead the nation. The Sooners also have 13 unbeaten seasons, the most recent of which was the 2000 national championship season.

Oklahoma also owns a winning record in postseason bowl competition. The Sooners 52 bowl appearances all-time is tied with Tennessee for the sixth most of any team. OU’s 29 bowl victories ranks fourth all-time, tied with Texas.

When you look back in OU football history, it’s pretty remarkable to learn that only one head coach (there have been 22 of them) managed never to have a winning season. John Blake, who was a former Oklahoma player, coached the Sooners from 1996-98. OU won 12 games in three seasons under Blake and just eight games against Big 12 opponents.

Only one other time in school history has Oklahoma experience as many as three losing football seasons in a row (1922-24).

If winning football is about 25 percent physical ability and 75 percent mental, as former NFL quarterback Joe Theismann has described it, Oklahoma has been outthinking its opponents for quite some time.

Information for this article was sourced, in part, from the 2019 Oklahoma Football Media Guide.