In this day and age, it’s hard to imagine any team equaling or exceeding the incredible 47-game win streak put together by Bud Wilkinson’s powerhouse Oklahoma football teams of the 1950s.
The Sooners not only own the NCAA-record 47-game streak, but also one of 31 games and 28 games, which rank ninth and 17th, respectively in NCAA Division I history.
Wilkinson’s teams didn’t lose many games — just 29 times in 17 seasons and 178 games as the Sooners’ head coach. In fact, 19 of those losses occurred in his final five seasons in Norman.
One of those 29 losses came in the season-opening game in 1953, when Oklahoma fell at home to Notre Dame, the nation’s top-ranked team, 28.-21. The Sooners also had lost to the Fighting Irish the previous year by a similar 27-21 score. It was their only loss in both seasons.
In the second game of the 1953 season. Oklahoma battled the University of Pittsburgh to a 7-7 tie. The next week, the Sooners defeated archrival Texas for what would be the first of 47 consecutive victories, spanning four and a half seasons.
It somehow seemed fitting that the team that ended OU’s record-setting 47-game winning streak was the same team that the Sooners last lost to, Notre Dame. The 7-0 Notre Dame victory eight games into the 1957 season not only ended college football’s longest winning streak but also marked the first time in 123 games that Oklahoma failed to score.
The backstory to the 47 consecutive Oklahoma wins is nearly as impressive as the streak itself. The Sooners won two national championships (1955 and ’56), defeated nine ranked opponents and held 22 opponents scoreless during the winning streak. They averaged 34.5 points a game over the course of the streak while limiting their opponents to just 5.9 points.
Despite not having lost a game in four and a half seasons, Oklahoma fell from the No. 1 ranking two different times in the 1957 season ahead of the Notre Dame loss.