If you’re a Sooner fan age 30 or younger, a Sept. 12 start to an Oklahoma football season would seem late.
While the Sooners’ 2020 season opener has been scheduled, rescheduled and rescheduled yet another time before settling on the Sept. 12 date.. the
Oklahoma will kick off the new season — which at one point a little over a month ago came close to not being a season at all because of continued health and safety concerns stemming from COVID-19 — on Saturday against Missouri State, an FCS (Football Championship Subdivision) opponent from the Missouri Valley Conference.
The Sooners will play just one nonconference opponent this season in a nine-plus-one format that essentially amounts to a conference-only schedule. You have to go back 51 years, to 1969, the year Steve Owens became Oklahoma’s third Heisman Trophy winner, to the last time the Sooners played just 10 games in a season.
Although Oklahoma had the best player in the country that season (Owens ran for 1,523 yards that season and 23 touchdowns), the Sooners finished 6-4 overall and just 4-3 in conference play and in fourth place in the Big Eight standings behind Missouri, Nebraska and Colorado.
In the early years of Oklahoma football, a season didn’t even constitute as many as 10 games. The Sooners’ season schedule didn’t include as many as 10 games until 1908, 13 years after the Sooners first began playing varsity football.
And as far as when the season began, it wasn’t unusual in those early years to open the season the first or second week in October. In fact, in OU’s third season, in 1897, the Sooners played just two games, one on Dec. 1 and the other on Dec. 31.
Since 1990, Oklahoma has generally begun the season the first or second weekend in Sept., but in OU’s 1985 national championship season, Barry Switzer’s Sooners didn’t kick off the season until Sept. 28 on road at Minnesota. Oklahoma won that game 13-7, as it has 97 of its 125 season openers.