Oklahoma football: Win streaks in Red River rivalry have gone both ways
By Chip Rouse
Texas is the only Big 12 school with a winning all-time record against the Oklahoma football team.
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While the Longhorns have won 62 or 56 percent of its Red River rivalry games with Oklahoma, the vast majority of those victories came in the first 50 years of this longtime rivalry series, which began in 1900.
Between 1900 and 1950, Texas was 30-13-2 in games against the Sooners. Since then, however, the series has been much more even, with Oklahoma holding a slight advantage with 35 wins, 32 losses and three games ending in a tie. Since 2000, OU owns a 14-7 record against Texas, including a win in the 2017 Big 12 Championship game. Texas won the regular-game that season, but the Sooners avenged that loss in the conference title game.
The first game in this historic rivalry series was in 1900. Texas won that inaugural game by a score of 28-2. The Longhorns followed that up with eight wins in the first nine games in the series with one ending in a tie. The two teams played twice in 1901 and 1903, with Texas winning three of the four games and one ending in 6-6 tie.
Oklahoma won seven of the next 11 games in the series, from 1911-1921. Over the next 21 seasons, Texas put together win streaks of six, three and eight games in compiling a record of 17-3-1 over that span. The eight consecutive Longhorn wins between 1941 and 1947 is the longest by either team in the 115-game series.
Texas had another eight-game win streak in the series from 1958 to 1965. That followed a six-game Oklahoma winning streak over the Longhorns between 1952 and 1957 during the Sooners’ glory years under Bud Wilkinson. Oklahoma won two national championships during that time (1955 and ’56).
Oklahoma has two other win streaks of five games over the hated Longhorns (1971-’75 in the Barry Switzer era and 2000-’04 under Bob Stoops).
Since 2005, neither team has won more than three games in a row. The Sooners did that in 2010, ’11 and ’12 and they repeated the trifecta by outlasting their hated Lone Star State rivals in four overtimes this past weekend.