Oklahoma football: Twenty-year interval OU’s longest between championships

This season marks the 20-year anniversary of the last Oklahoma football national championship.

Despite being undefeated and the No. 1 team in the country, Bob Stoops’ Sooner team surprised many in the college football world by holding the highly potent Florida State offense to just a safety in claiming a 13-2 Orange Bowl victory to win the 2000 BCS national championship.

That was just Stoops second season at OU after taking over a team that had endured a very un-Oklahoma-like three consecutive losing seasons prior to his arrival. Prior to the 2000 season, the last time a Sooner team finished the season ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 was in 1993 in the fifth of six seasons with former OU player Gary Gibbs as head coach.

If you look back over the past seven decades of Oklahoma football, the Sooners are overdue to get that elusive eighth national championship.

OU won the first of its seven national championships in 1950 under Bud Wilkinson, who went on to win three national titles over a six-year span (1950, 1955 and 1956).

The Sooners would go 18 seasons after its 1956 top ranking before ascending to the top of the college football world once again in 1974. Oklahoma, in its second season under Barry Switzer in 1974, was undefeated for a second straight year, going 11-0 and winning the Big Eight championship for a third straight year.

The Sooners finished No. 1 in the country that season in the Associated Press Poll of writers and broadcasters, but because they were in the second year of an NCAA suspension, they were not recognized as No. 1 by the UPI coaches’ poll, which did not rank teams on probation. Southern California  (10-1-1) was declared the UPI national champion, so both OU and USC shared the national crown in the 1974 season.

The following year was another story, however. Oklahoma actually lost its first game 25 games into Switzer’s tenure as head coach, a 20-17 defeat to the University of Miami (Florida). But that was the only game the Sooners would lose that season. OU capped off an 11-1 season with a 14-6 win over fifth-ranked Michigan in the Orange Bowl and ended the season No. 1 in both the AP and UPI polls. Switzer joined the legendary Wilkinson by claiming back-to-back national titles, even if one had an asterisk beside it.

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Switzer wasn’t done, however, winning national championship trophies. Like, Wilkinson, he led the Sooners to a third national crown with his 1985 OU team, led on the field by a freshman quarterback named Jamelle Holieway. Oklahoma went 11-1 that season, the one loss again coming against the Miami Hurricanes, who had Switzer’s number throughout his 16-seasons as Sooner head coach.

The No. 3 Sooners defeated top-ranked Penn State 25-10 in the Orange Bowl, which was enough to earn Oklahoma a sixth national championship trophy, coming exactly 10 seasons after the last one.

It would be 15 years and four head coaches before the Sooners would taste the honey of becoming the top team in college football one more time.

Oklahoma began the 2000 season ranked No. 19 in the AP preseason rankings. A blowout 63-14 win over No. 11 Texas moved the Sooners to No. 8, and victories over No. 2 Kansas State and No. 1 Nebraska in successive games moved them onto the top rung in the national rankings for the first time since the 1987 season. It was also OU’s first perfect season since 1974, another championship year.

The upcoming season will mark 20 years since the last Oklahoma national championship, the longest interval between national titles since the Sooners captured the very first one 70 years ago.

It isn’t as if Oklahoma hasn’t had it chances to cash in on another national championship, and not just one. Four times in the Stoops era, the Sooners played in the BCS National Championship, but they came away a winner just once.

Oklahoma also has participated in the College Football Playoff four times out of the six years that format has been in existence (once with Stoops and three times with Lincoln Riley), but have failed to make it past the first game in all four appearances.

Riley has been in place as the OU head coach for three season. In those three years, Oklahoma has won three consecutive Big 12 championships, been to three straight College Football Playoffs and produced two Heisman Trophy winners and a Heisman runner-up. About the only thing he hasn’t delivered is a national title, and a number of experts believe that is just a matter of time.

Oklahoma fans are wishful that time will come Sooner rather than later.