Oklahoma football: Primer for the 116th Red River Showdown
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma football rivalry with Texas is more than a century old and one of the most celebrated games every season.
This year marks the 116th edition of the border-war rivalry series that began back in 1900. It is not the oldest college rivalry game — in fact, it wouldn’t make the top 10 in terms of longevity — but it is easily one of the most popular, largely because of the elite status and historic national reputations of both programs.
There are many things that make this rivalry football game special and very different than most every other college football rivalry. For one thing, it is played on a neutral field every season, although very early in its history the game was played at the two campus sites.
Since 1932, the game has been held at the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas. The stadium is located in Fair Park in Dallas, which stages the Texas State Fair the first two weeks in October every year. The annual OU-Texas game is played during that same time every year. That, in itself, makes this game very different than any other in college football.
Another unique characteristic of this game is the crowd configuration. Half of the stadium, or about 45,000 fans seated from the 50-yard line to 50-yard line, extending all the way around the south end of the stadium, is decked out in Oklahoma crimson, while the other half is similarly featured around the north end, proudly adorned in Texas burnt orange.
An estimated quarter of a million people attended the Texas State Fair last year on the day of the OU-Texas game, including the 90,000-plus who were inside the Cotton Bowl to witness the Sooners’ 35-27 victory over the Longhorns.
This year’s Red River Showdown, as it is currently billed (it also has been promoted in the past as the Red River Rivalry, the Red River Shootout and the Red River Classic) will be very different.
To begin with, the Texas State Fair has been cancelled for this year, so the fairgrounds will be empty for the game — no rides and no games, but there will be a few food vendors open to service the some 25,000 fans that will be allowed to attend the game (12,500 tickets have been allotted to each team).
The familiar fair sights of Big Tex, the iconic 55-foot cowboy that welcomes visitors to the state fair, and the Texas Star, the giant ferris wheel that sits just outside the Cotton Bowl will still be present, but everything else about the scene for this year’s game will be different out of concern for coronavirus exposure. The only other time the State Fair of Texas has been cancelled was during World War II.
On Saturday morning, the team busses will pull into an empty fairgrounds.
“It’ll be different,” Lincoln Riley said on Tuesday in his weekly press briefing.
"“It will still be awesome. It always is. Pulling in there without all the people and the atmosphere and all that being a little bit different, yeah, but it’s still going to be a very high-quality football game.”"
Getting back to the game itself, Oklahoma has won seven of the last 10 regular-season games with Texas, but the Longhorns own the advantage in the all-time rivalry series with a record of 62-48-5. Since 1971, however, the Sooners lead in the series, 27-20-3.
The winning team is awarded the Golden Hat, a gold cowboy hat mounted on a large block of wood. The trophy is presented on the field after the game, and the players on the winning team are often seen donning the Golden Hat in postgame images.
Bob Stoops and Mack Brown were the respective coaches for the Sooners and Longhorns in this game for 15 seasons. Stoops prevailed 9-6 in that battle. Tom Herman has been the Texas coach the past four seasons. He is 2-2 against the Sooners in regular-season Red River rivalry games. OU’s Riley has been the head coach in three of these games, winning two and losing one.