Oklahoma football: Sooners fourth winningest team of past decade
By Chip Rouse
Historic success in college football is measured in wins and losses, and the teams with the best winning percentage are the ones who are able to win consistently over a long period of time. The Oklahoma football program is one at the very top of the list.
The college football staff at 247Sports recently did a quantitative analysis examining the top college teams over the past decade and ranked the top 25 teams during that period according to winning percentage.
It shouldn’t be that surprising that Oklahoma is high on the list of the top 10 winningest teams of the past decade. The Sooners are the fifth winningest program all-time in college football, according to Sports Illustrated and other national sources. OU’s 928 all-time wins and .728 winning percentage ranks just behind No, 1 Ohio State (942 wins, .732 winning percentage), Alabama (942 wins, .731), Notre Dame (929 wins, .730) and Michigan (976 wins, .729).
The four teams ranked ahead of the Sooners in all-time win percentage all began playing football a few years before Oklahoma did and, in the case of Michigan, 17 years ahead of OU.
Since the end of World War II, a period spanning from 1946 to the present, no team from a Power Five conference has more wins that Oklahoma’s 684. The closest team over that time frame is Alabama with 646 wins.
This winning tradition has carried over at Oklahoma for the past 23 seasons — 18 under Bob Stoops, whose Sooner teams won 80 percent of their games (191-38) and five under Lincoln Riley, who won 85 percent of his games as the Sooners’ head coach.
Over the past 10 years (2012-2021), Oklahoma ranks fourth among teams that compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision with a record of 107-24 and a winning percentage of .817. During that time, Oklahoma produced two Heisman Trophy winners (Baker Mayfield in 2017 and Kyler Murray in 2018), four teams that made appearances in the College Football Playoff (2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019), and four Sooner teams that finished in the top-five in both the Associated Press poll and the CFP final rankings.
In other words, the Sooners were darn good during the past decade, as they have been over most of the past of the past 76 years.
Who were the three teams that performed better than Oklahoma over the past 10 seasons? I’m sure you can guess, but here they are anyway: 1. Alabama (128-13, .908 winning percentage), 2. Ohio State (116-13, .899) and 3. Clemson (121-17, .877).
Hard to argue with that level of success. The Sooners are in some rarified air, for sure. And that is something they and their fans take great pride in.