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Oklahoma football: Sooners the winningest Power Five team this century

By Chip Rouse

NORMAN, OK - DECEMBER 3: Head Coach Bob Stoops of the Oklahoma Sooners poses for pictures with the team after the game against the Oklahoma State Cowboys December 3, 2016 at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman, Oklahoma. Oklahoma defeated Oklahoma State 38-20 to become Big XII champions. (Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images)
NORMAN, OK - DECEMBER 3: Head Coach Bob Stoops of the Oklahoma Sooners poses for pictures with the team after the game against the Oklahoma State Cowboys December 3, 2016 at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman, Oklahoma. Oklahoma defeated Oklahoma State 38-20 to become Big XII champions. (Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images) /
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If you are what your record says you are, Oklahoma football is the best in college football this century.

The Sooners don’t have the number of national championships that some others like Alabama, LSU, Ohio State and Clemson have won since the 2000 season, but in terms of total wins, no Power Five program has been better.

In fact, Oklahoma not only is the winningest team in college football this century but the winningest program in what is known as the modern era of college football, or since the end of World War II (1946 to the present).

Since the 1946 season, which not coincidentally was the legendary Bud Wilkinson’s first season at Oklahoma — but not as head coach; he was an assistant that first season under Jum Tatum and was elevated to head coach the following season when Tatum left to take the same job at Maryland — the Sooners have won 683 college football games, more than any other school.

For you stat heads, that’s 37 more wins than the closest challenger (Alabama). Three Oklahoma head coaches (Wilkinson, Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops) are responsible for 494, or 72 percent, of those victories.

And the winning has continued in the 2000s. Since OU’s 2000 national championship season, no team in a Power Five conference has won more games than the 239 won by Oklahoma over the last 22 seasons. Stoops’ Sooner teams over 17 seasons since the turn of the century recorded 184 of those victories, including the most recent OU win, a 42-32 triumph over Oregon in the Alamo Bowl in which Stoops served as interim head coach.

The other 55 OU wins in the new millennium, of course, belong to Lincoln Riley.

New Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables, who was on Stoops’ coaching staff for 13 seasons, will be adding to the Sooners’ winning ways as the next chapter in OU football history unfolds beginning with the 2022 season.

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