Oklahoma football: The Mount Rushmore of all-time Sooner quarterbacks

Great football teams are generally the product of great quarterback play and Oklahoma football is no exception.

The Sooners have been blessed with some of the college game’s best at the position. This has been especially true during the first two decades of the 2000s.

The role of the OU quarterback has changed dramatically over the years. In the Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer eras, the forward pass was only a secondary element of the offense as the Sooner quarterbacks were used more as facilitators — and freqently as ball carriers themselves — of the powerful Oklahoma running game.

The first three of Oklahoma’s seven Heisman Trophy winners were all products of the prolific Sooner ground game and two of the three — Billy Sims and Steve Owens — rank among the team’s top-five career rushing leaders. The last four Sooners to take home the iconic Heisman Trophy, however, have all been quarterbacks, and two other Sooner signal-callers finished as Heisman runners-up.

All four of the Oklahoma quarterbacks who won the Heisman, and also the two runners-up, played in the past 16 seasons. This is not to say that OU didn’t have outstanding quarterback play in the previous century, just that the quarterback position at Oklahoma has changed since the days of the split-T  offense and the triple-option wishbone.

So who are the four greatest quarterbacks in Oklahoma football history, the four who would be most deserving of having their image carved in stone as in Mount Rushmore worthy. Our vote goes with these four, in no particular order: