The spirt, tradition and drama of rivalry games are one of the best things about college sports, and the Oklahoma football program is often measured by them.
At Oklahoma, all wins are considered important, and the Sooners have been blessed with a whole bunch of them. In the last 75 years, or what is considered the modern era of college football (1946 to present), no NCAA Division I team has more wins than the Sooners.
Since 1946 the Sooners have won 664 games. The next closest is Ohio State with 621, followed by Alabama with 620. Seventy-five percent of those 664 Oklahoma wins have been delivered by three legendary OU head coaches — Bud Wilkinson (1947-1963), Barry Switzer (157-29-4) and Bob Stoops (190-48) — who coached the Sooners in 51 of those 75 seasons.
Although winning has been a longtime tradition of Oklahoma football, all wins are not created equal. Wins in rivalry games count more. Just ask John Blake, who was 2-6 in three seasons (1996-98) against chief rivals Texas and Nebraska and in-state foe Oklahoma State, or Gary Gibbs, who was 5-0-1 against Oklahoma State but was a dismal and ill-fated, as it turned out, 2-10 against Texas and Nebraska between 1989 and 1994.
Oklahoma’s three winningest coaches, the Killer B’s of Bud, Barry and Bob, who won 492 games between them, also had something else in common. They all won heavily against the Sooners’ three chief rivals.
Wilkinson’s Sooner teams of the 1950s and early ’60s had the best record against Oklahoma’s three main rivals, fashioning a 40-11 (.784) record overall and an incredible 31-3 against Nebraska and Oklahoma State.
Wilkinson never lost to Oklahoma State in 17 seasons. His OU teams did not show the same amount of dominance, though, against their biggest rival, Texas. Oklahoma was 9-8 against the Longhorns in the Wilkinson years, including losing six consecutive times in Wilkinson’s final six seasons in Norman.
Switzer had the second best rivalry record (35-11-2, .750) and was the best of the three in rivalry games with Texas. Switzer’s OU teams won nine times against the Longhorns, lost five and played to a tie twice. He almost matched Wilkinson against Oklahoma State, losing just once to their in-state rivals in 16 games.
Oklahoma had some classic battles with Nebraska during the 1970s and ’80s. Switzer was 11-5 versus the Cornhuskers, winning seven of the first eight games in which he faced Nebraska and its Hall of Fame coach, Tom Osborne, as a head coach.
Stoops didn’t have as many gridiron encounters with Nebraska as his two predecessors because the Cornhuskers left the Big 12 for the Big Ten after the 2010 season. The Sooners did have eight games with Nebraska during the Stoops years, though, and Oklahoma won six of them, including a 31-14 win over the No. 1-ranked Cornhuskers in 2000 that returned the Sooners to the top position in the polls for the first time since 1987.
OU and Texas squared off 18 times with Stoops on the sidelines for Oklahoma. The Sooners were 11-7 in those showdowns in the Cotton Bowl, and between 2000 and 2004, Oklahoma won five straight times.
Stoops also had the number of the Sooners’ in-state rival, posting eight consecutive wins over the Oklahoma State from 2003 to 2010 and an overall record of 14-4.
Current head coach Lincoln Riley has found his groove early on in Oklahoma’s annual rivalry contests. He hasn’t gone up against Nebraska yet, but against Texas and Oklahoma State he is off to a very Sooner-like 6-1 performance.