Oklahoma football: Which coaching job is better, OU or Texas?
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma football rivalry with Texas has outlived their affiliation as Big 12 conference compatriots and foes by almost 100 years.
The OU-Texas football rivalry is one of the oldest and most celebrated rivalries in college football. Nearly every year since 1900 these two longtime rivals have met on the gridiron for an annual showdown. In total, the Sooners and Longhorns have played 116 games, with Texas winning 62 times and Oklahoma 49 times. There have been five games that ended in a tie.
The Red River rivalry series between Oklahoma and Texas dates back more than 100 years, and the Longhorns dominated the series in the early years, winning 45 of the first 75 games between the two schools.
Since the 1970s, Oklahoma has a winning record over Texas
Since Barry Switzer became the Sooners’ head coach in 1973, however, OU is 26-20-3 against the Longhorns, and the margin has widened even more in Oklahoma’s favor since 2000. The Sooners are 15-7 against Texas in the last 22 games, including a win-streak of five games and two of three consecutive games. Lincoln Riley is 4-1 against Texas.
That’s how the two schools stack up against each other, but the difference in terms of their overall record of success is even greater, especially over the past decade. Since 2011, Oklahoma owns the fourth best record among teams that compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
The Sooners are 106-25, a winning percentage of .809, over the past 10 seasons, including four College Football Playoff appearances and seven Big 12 championships.. Over the same span, Texas is 73-53, a .579 winning percentage, which ranks 46th nationally.
Going back half a century, to the early 1970s, Oklahoma has recorded 62 more wins than the Longhorns (475 to 413).
The Sooners and Longhorns are highly competitive in recruiting wars
Both schools have tremendous resources available to the football program, but Texas has the edge here, given that it has one of the largest, if not the largest, athletic budgets in all of college sports.
Both schools recruit heavily in the state of Texas for talent. Forty-two members of OU’s 2021 roster hail from the Lone Star State. Over the past decade, and even before that, Oklahoma and Texas have regularly ranked the highest in the Big 12 in recruiting class rankings. And both schools have regularly pulled in top-20 recruiting classes over the past 10 seasons.
The major difference in the recruiting effort has been that the Oklahoma coaches appear to do a better job of developing the talent they recruit, as evidenced by the number of conference championships won by the two schools in the past 10 years (seven for Oklahoma, none for Texas).
Coaching stability much stronger at Oklahoma
Oklahoma’s record of success during the past decade is well documented. That success is reflected and well contrasted in the coaching changes at the two schools. Since 2011, Texas has had four head coaches (Mack Brown, Charlie Strong, Tom Herman and now Steve Sarkisian). Over that same time frame, Oklahoma has had just two (Bob Stoops and Lincoln Riley).
In a recent ranking of the best active coaches in college football, Riley ranks as high as No. 3 (behind Alabama’s Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney of Clemson), yet is No. 8 in terms of annual salary. Nevertheless, Riley’s $6.2 million annual salary is still higher than Sarkisian’s reported $5.2 million first-year salary at Texas.
So which job is better?
They like to say everything thing is bigger in Texas and, in all honesty, the Texas football coaching job should be bigger and better. Only right now it’s not.
The Oklahoma coaching job has been the better of the two jobs ever since Bob Stoops landed in Norman, Oklahoma. Stoops not only returned the Sooners to national relevance, he returned them to national prominence.
Since 2000, Oklahoma has captured a national championship (2000), 14 Big 12 championships and finished in the top-10 of the final Associated Press poll 15 times. Over than same span, Texas has one national championship (2005), two Big 12 championships and finished in the AP Top 10 seven times.
You tell me which is the better job?