Oklahoma football: Sooners among best teams that failed to win a national title

Oklahoma football has won seven national championships, tied for third most all-time.

Unfortunately, though, the Sooners have become better known for failing to finish the job with OU teams that probably should have won a national title.

Bob Stoops’ Sooners won a national championship in 2000,  his second season as head coach. That is the most recent national title won by Oklahoma, although the Sooners have had a number of opportunities since then.

Three other times between 2001 and 2008, Oklahoma was one of the final two teams that played for the BCS national championship. All three times, the Sooners came up on the losing end.

The Sooners have also been regular participants in the College Football Playoff. Oklahoma has appeared in the CFP in four of the six years the playoff format has been in effect, once under Stoops (2015) and in each of the last three seasons under Lincoln Riley. In all four trips to the playoff, however, Oklahoma has failed to make it past the first game.

Recognizing that there have been many great college football teams over the years that easily could have but for whatever reason did not win the national championship, ESPN staff writer Bill Connelly has come up with a top-25 list of the best teams in the Associated Press poll era (1935 to present) that did not claim the ultimate prize.

Sooner fans probably won’t be surprised to find several great Oklahoma teams from the past on this list, including three in the top 10. What is a bit surprising, though, is that no Sooner teams of the past 20 years made the list.

OU has had  multiple great teams that could have won a national championship.

Connelly lists five Oklahoma teams that didn’t win a national championship, but were good enough to do so. The five teams fall in three different decades and three different OU coaching eras.

Oklahoma won its first three national championships in football in the 1950s (1950, 1955 and 1956) under head coach Bud Wilkinson. The Sooners were in good position for a fourth title in that decade in 1958. They began the season ranked No. 2, but a loss in their annual rivalry game against Texas, the only loss the Sooners would incur that season, ultimately cost  them a title shot.

Connelly ranked the 1958 Oklahoma team No. 20 among the greatest college teams that weren’t able to finish what they started and missed out on a probable national championship.

Chuck Fairbanks was the coach of the 1971 and ’72 Oklahoma teams. Offensive coordinator Barry Switzer introduced the OU version of the wishbone offense in 1971, and the Sooners went 11-1 both years. A loss to No. 1 Nebraska in what was billed as the “Game of the Century” cost them a national title that season. The following year, OU’s lone loss was a six-point defeat at Colorado.

Those two Sooner team finished the season ranked No. 2 in the final AP poll. The ’71 team is No, 16 in ESPN’s woulda-coulda-shoulda top-25 ranking. The 1972 Oklahoma team is 10 spots higher, at No. 6. Interestingly, Switzer became head coach in 1973, and his ’74 and ’75 Sooner teams won back-to-back national championships, going 22-1 in the process.

Switzer also won a national title in 1985, when Jamelle Holieway became the first freshman quarterback in NCAA Division I history to lead a team to a national championship. The only game the Sooners lost that season was to the University of Miami in a contest in which future All-American Troy Aikman started at quarterback but was forced out of the game in the second quarter with a fractured ankle and replaced by Holieway. The rest is history.

Some college football experts, including ESPN’s Connelly, believe that the 1986 and 1987 Oklahoma teams were equally capable of winning a national championship. Like the 1985 OU team, the ’86 and ’87 Sooners also won 11 of 12 games, and both losses, ironically, were to that same Miami Hurricanes team coached by Switzer’s fellow Arkansas alumnus Jimmy Johnson.

Connelly ranked the 1987 and 1986 OU teams as Nos. 2 and 3 in his top-25 list and as the best Oklahoma teams not to win a national championship.

Although there might be some disagreement about which Oklahoma teams were the best not to win a national championship, there should be little argument that the five Sooner teams in Connelly’s top-25 ranking were all great teams and among the very best in the country in the years indicated.