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Oklahoma football: Can Sooners reprise 2000 and run the table?

By Chip Rouse

3 Jan 2001: Head Coach Bob Stoops, J.T. Thatcher #15 and Ontei Jones #11 of the Oklahoma Sooners celebrate after defeating the Florida State Seminoles 13-2 to win the Orange Bowl at Pro Player Stadium in Miami, Florida. DIGITAL IMAGE Mandatory Credit: Brian Bahr/ALLSPORT
3 Jan 2001: Head Coach Bob Stoops, J.T. Thatcher #15 and Ontei Jones #11 of the Oklahoma Sooners celebrate after defeating the Florida State Seminoles 13-2 to win the Orange Bowl at Pro Player Stadium in Miami, Florida. DIGITAL IMAGE Mandatory Credit: Brian Bahr/ALLSPORT /
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Perhaps the hardest thing to do in college football is to finish the season undefeated. Nineteen FBS teams have done it since the 2000 season, including the 2000 national champion Sooners.

Most of the time, ending the season without a loss results in a national championship, but not always. At the very least, it will now almost certainly earn you a berth in the four-team playoff for the national championship.

Brent McMurphy, a college football writer for The Action Network, projected this week that six FBS teams would win all of their games through a 12-game, 2022 regular-season schedule, and Oklahoma is one of those teams in Brent Venables debut season as the new head coach of the Sooners.

The other five teams he predicts will run the table in the regular season are Alabama and Georgia out of the SEC, Ohio State in the Big Ten and Utah out of the Pac-12. Air Force is the sixth team McMurphy projected to go undefeated in the 2022 regular season. He projects Alabama and Ohio State to win all of the regular-season games by double digits.

Oklahoma has had 11 undefeated seasons in its 127-year history and nine perfect seasons. Since 1947, however, Bud Wilkinson’s first season as head coach of the Sooners, Oklahoma has made it through the regular season without a tie or loss marring its season record just seven times.

Wilkinson’s teams went undefeated for a full season (including bowl games) four times in 17 seasons, including three consecutive years (1954, 1955 and 1956, all during the Sooners record 47-game winning streak). That is the most on any OU head coach in history. Wilkinson also had an undefeated top-ranked team in the regular season (1951) that ended the season in a loss the No. 7 Kentucky in the Orange Bowl.

Bob Stoops led OU to a 13-0 perfect season in 2000, and his 2004 team was 12-0 going into the BCS national championship game against No. 1 USC. His 2003 Sooner team was 12-0 through the regular-season schedule but lost to Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship and to LSU for the BCS national championship.

Barry Switzer had two consecutive undefeated seasons in his first two as the Oklahoma head coach, in 1973 and ’74. A 1973 tie against No. 1-ranked USC was the only blemish those two seasons.

Bennie Owen, whose 22 seasons as Oklahoma head coach from 1905-1926 was the longest in Sooner history, produced three undefeated OU teams (1911, 1915 and 1918) and one season without a loss but one tie (1920). That was during a time, however, when teams played as few as six or eight games over a full season.

The bottom line is that going undefeated, whether in the regular season over through the entire postseason, is extremely difficult, especially in today’s game where the competition is more balanced and there is relative parity at the top of all five major conferences and getting even more competitive with conference consolidation and realignment.

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