Oklahoma football: Which OU coaching era had best 20-year run?

Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma football teams of the 1950s lay claim to the most successful decade in the school’s storied and highly decorated gridiron history.

And that speaks volumes when you consider the great Sooner teams that played under Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops, both of whom outpaced Wilkinson in terms of total wins.

Based on winning percentage alone, the 1950s (.895), 1970s (.877) and 2000s (821), in that order, are the best 10-year periods in Sooner history.

We thought it would fun to extend that out even further to find out which of the teams three primary coaching eras since 1950 had the best 20-year record of success, recognizing that none of the three coached Oklahoma for a full 20 years.

Bennie Owen (1905-1926) owns the longevity record among the Sooners’ 22 all-time head coaches, but Oklahoma football was not the national power that it became nearly a half-century later.

For the purposes of this exercise, we combined the 1950s and ’60s and considered that the Wilkinson era. Likewise the 1970s and ’80s, which with the exception of one season (1989) takes into account the time Switzer was either offensive coordinator or head coach of the Sooners. Bob Stoops was Oklahoma head coach for the first 16 seasons of the 2000s, but his hand print was all over the team that Lincoln Riley inherited in 2017.

Who knows, at his current pace, Riley may become the fifth OU coach to reach 100 wins. He’s almost halfway there with 45 wins and already has the best record in his first four seasons of any Sooner head coach, passing Stoops (43) and Switzer (41) this past season.

Between 1950 and 1963, Wilkinson’s final season at Oklahoma, the Sooners won 117 games, lost 26 and tied 3. That included OU’s first three national championships.

The final seven seasons of the 1960s, however, Oklahoma football was pedestrian at best under three different head coaches, with 38 total wins and a .603 winning percentage. As a result, the Sooners’ record for the two decades was 155-50-4 (.742).

Like Riley, Switzer took over a Sooner team that was already championship caliber and that he had a large hand in building as offensive coordinator under Chuck Fairbanks. Over the next 16 seasons, Switzer’s teams won three national championships, failed to win 10 games just six times and never won fewer than eight in a season.

From 1970 through 1989, one year after Switzer resigned as head coach amid scandal and widespread criticism of the way the popular head coach was managing the program, Oklahoma fashioned an outstanding record of 193-39 (.814) over the two decades.

As consistently good as the Oklahoma teams were in the 20-year period of the 1970s and ’80s, the Sooner teams of Stoops and Riley in the 20 years since the 2000 national championship season represent the best two-decades, in terms of winning percentage, in the long, illustrious history of Oklahoma football.

The Oklahoma football record from 2000 to 2019 (17 under Stoops and three under Riley) was a program-best 219-49. The .817 winning percentage during that period was slightly better than the .814 percentage of the 1970-’80s OU teams.

The Sooners won only one national title in the first 20 years of the 21st century, but they did play for the national championship four times (in BCS era) and also advanced to the College Football Playoff four times. In addition, four different Oklahoma players were awarded the Heisman Trophy and three other finished as runner-up in the Heisman voting.

We all know that Oklahoma football success is ultimately measured in national championship trophies. But perhaps another way of looking at it is, Sooner fans of the last 20 years have witnessed the best Oklahoma football has to offer.