Oklahoma football: 1970s marked a rebirth of elite Sooner excellence
By Chip Rouse
In 1963, Bud Wilkinson’s final season coaching Oklahoma football, the Sooners finished with a respectable 8-2 record and were 6-1 in the Big Eight.
That was the third time in the past four seasons that Oklahoma failed to win the Big Eight championship after taking home the the conference trophy 13 straight years. The Sooners’ league dominance in football extended all 10 years of the 1950s.
After Wilkinson’s final season, the Sooners won as many as eight games just twice in the next eight years.
Oklahoma was a very un-Sooner-like 15-15 in the three seasons after Wilkinson left the program.
It wasn’t until Chuck Fairbanks was elevated to he head coach’s role in 1967, after the untimely death of Jim Mckenzie that spring in what would have been his second season at Oklahoma, that the Sooners found their way back to national relevance.
Fairbanks coached the team in the first three seasons of the 1970s, as well as the three years before that, compiling an overall record of 52-15-1 (.772), the fourth highest winning percentage of any OU head football coach with at least five seasons.
Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator when Fairbanks became head coach was one Barry Switzer. Fairbanks departed following the 1972 season to become head coach of the New England Patriots in the NFL, and the 16 seasons that followed are part of one of the greatest eras in Sooner football history.
In the first three seasons of the 1970s, Oklahoma was 29-6-1 under Fairbanks. The Sooners won the Big Eight crown in Fairbanks’ final season in 1972 and didn’t give it up for eight more years with Switzer as the new man at the helm.
In the decade of the 1970s, Oklahoma won 102 games, lost 13 and tied three, a winning percentage of .877, second best in program history. Switzer’s Sooner teams were 73-7-1 during the 1970s, including back-to-back national championships in 1974 and 1975. In his first three seasons as head coach (1973-75), Switzer’s record was a phenomenal 32-1-1.
In addition to two national championship trophies and eight Big Eight championships, Oklahoma produced 25 first-team All-Americans, including 14 two-time, first-teamers. Rod Shoate, an OU linebacker from 1972-74, was named a First-Team All-American three times, one of just two in Oklahoma history.
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There have been great Oklahoma teams is every decade since the Wilkinson years following World War II, but the 10 years in the 1970s was unquestionably one of the best.