Oklahoma football: Downfield look at OU-Texas Tech series history

Although they were both once members of the Southwest Conference, the Oklahoma football series with Texas Tech totals just 27 games.

Twenty-four of those games have been as co-inhabitants of the Big 12, which Texas Tech became a member of in 1996 when the Big Eight Conference and Southwest Conference came together to form the Big 12.

Oklahoma was also a member of the Southwest Conference, but at a much different time than Texas Tech.

The Sooners were an original founding member of the SWC, which began in 1915. Oklahoma left the SWC in 1919 to become part of the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association. When that conference grew to 10 members in 1928, six state schools, including Oklahoma, broke away and formed the Big Six Conference, a forerunner to the Big 12.

Texas Tech did not become a member of the Southwest Conference until 1956 and remained until the conference merged with the Big 12.

Texas Tech was founded in 1923.  Originally known as Texas Technological College, the institution fielded its first varsity football team in 1925.

Although Oklahoma played its first football game with the University of Texas in 1900, played Baylor as early as 1901 and faced a team from Texas Christian University for the first time in 1944, the Sooners did not play a football game against Texas Tech until 1992. That game was at Texas Tech, and OU, coached by Gary Gibbs, won 34-9.

The Sooners and Red Raiders met again, the following year, in the Sun Bowl in El Paso. OU quarterback Cale Gundy passed for 215 yards and led the Sooners to a 41-10 victory. Oklahoma raced out to a 28-3 lead at halftime and cruised from there, hold Texas Tech All-American running back Bam Morris to just 95 yards rushing on 27 carries.

The two teams met one more time, in 1994, before they became joint members of the Big 12. The 1994 game was played in Norman and was one of the lowest scoring games in the relatively short history of the series. Seventeen points was enough to win the game, with Oklahoma pulling out a 17-11 victory.

Oklahoma also hosted the very first Big 12 game between the Sooners and the Red Raiders in 1996. The Sooners welcomed Texas Tech into the Big 12, losing 22-12 at home to the Red Raiders.

Since then, Oklahoma has gone 18-5 against Texas Tech and is riding a current eight-game winning streak as the two conference foes get ready to square off on Saturday night in Lubbock in front of a limited crowd and a national primetime television audience on FOX.

Arguably the two most memorable games in the series were the 41-38 Texas Tech win in 2011 and the epic 124-point shootout in 2016 between Patrick Mahomes and Baker Mayfield.

In the 2016 game, the two teams combined for an NCAA-record 1,708 yards of offense in a 65-59 Oklahoma win at Texas Tech. Interestingly, each team has 854 yards of total offense.

Mayfield completed 27 of 36 passes for 545 yards and seven touchdowns and Joe Mixon contributed 377 total yards and five touchdowns. Mixon had 263 yards rushing, including touchdown runs of 46 and 42 yards, and 114 yards receiving with three receiving TDs.

Dede Westbrook also caught a pair of touchdown passes for Oklahoma in the game to go with 202 yards receiving on nine catches. The 16th-ranked Sooners led 30-24 at the half and scored on five of their six possessions in the second half.

Patrick Mahomes was also on fire for the unranked Red Raiders. Mahomes put the ball in the air an incredible 88 times, completing 52 to 10 different receivers for 734 yards and five touchdowns.

Oklahoma ended the 2016 season with a record of 11-2 overall and undefeated (9-0) in the Big 12, winning their 10th Big 12 championship and second in a row. The seventh-ranked Sooners defeated No. 16 Auburn 35-19 in the Sugar Bowl that season.

In 2011, Oklahoma was ranked No. 3 in the country and riding a 39-game home winning streak when Texas Tech came to Norman. The game was delayed by a couple of hours because of lightning and inclement weather, which should have been an early signal to the Sooners that this wasn’t going to be their night.

The two teams traded first-quarter touchdowns, but the Red Raiders exploded for 17 unanswered points and took a 24-7 lead into the locker room at halftime.

The Sooners fought back in the second half and actually cut the Texas Tech advantage down to three points, at 41-38, with a little over a minute remaining in the game. But an onside kick attempt by OU was successfully covered by the Red Raiders, who ran out the clock from there.

Landry Jones threw for 412 yards and five touchdowns for the Sooners, but it wasn’t quite enough as Texas Tech quarterback Set Doege countered with 441 passing yards of his own and four touchdowns.

The loss was only Bob Stoops’ third at home since he became the OU head coach in 1999. The Sooners had not lost a home game since a season-opening loss to TCU in 2005. Oklahoma would lose twice more that season (to No. 25 Baylor and No. 3 Oklahoma State, both on the road) and finished with a 10-3 record and fourth place in the Big 12.