Oklahoma football: What was it like in the beginning?

Most of us think of the beginning of Oklahoma football from the 1950s to the present, a history of which has produced several prominent eras of Sooner excellence.

All of the OU national championships have come since 1950, as well as all of the school’s Heisman Trophy winners. Seven-up in both categories. Oklahoma actually did win conference championships prior to 1950.

Oklahoma began playing varsity football in 1895, five years after the university was established and a dozen years before statehood. The Sooners lost the very first game they played, according to OU athletic department records. They suffered a 34-0 defeat to a town team from Oklahoma City. The OU team for that first game reportedly consisted primarily of non-students and also included a local fireman. The contest was completely one-sided. The original Sooner football squad did not even record a first down.

John A. Harts, a student from Winfield, Kansas (near Wichita), organized the first OU college team and served as the team’s first head coach. That was the only season he would coach the Sooners. The following year, Year 2 of the program, in 1896, the Oklahoma team did not have an official head coach, but the Sooners did win the two games they played that season.

After losing that very first game in 1895, OU would win eight consecutive games over four seasons (1896-99). Five different men served as head coach of the Oklahoma University football team over the first 10 year of the program. The Sooners were 29-15-5 in their first 10 seasons of organized football.

In the very early years, before the turn of the century, it was not uncommon to schedule just two or three games a season.

Legendary OU head coach Bennie Owen was named head coach of the Sooner football program beginning in 1905 and would remain in the post for 21 more seasons. Owen (after whom Owen Field is named) was a former quarterback at Kansas. In fact, his Kansas team beat Oklahoma twice in 1903 and 1904.

Owen was the coach at Washburn in Topeka, Kansas, in 1900, an assistant at Michigan in 1901 and was the coach at Bethany (Kansas) for three years, from 1902-04, before landing at Oklahoma. He became the first Oklahoma head coach to win more than 100 games, and football wasn’t the only sport for which he served as head coach while at OU. He was also the basketball coach from 1908 to 1921 and coached the baseball team in the spring, from 1906 to 1922. He also found time between 1907 and 1934 to serve as the school’s athletic director.

Owen’s football teams at Oklahoma compiled an overall record of 122-54-16. He is the fourth winningest coach in Sooner history based on total wins. Oklahoma won two Southwest Conference championships under Owen and one Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association title. Those were the first three of seven conference championships by the Sooners before the Bud Wilkinson era, which began in 1947.

Between the years 1927, the year after Owen stepped down from his football duties, and 1945, Sooner football went through some lean years, with the exception of the 1938 team under head coach Tom Stidham. That Sooner team finished with a 10-1 record and an undefeated 5-0 in the then Big Six Conference. Oklahoma also won back-to-back conference championships in 1943-44 with Dewey Luster as head coach.

Jim Tatum took over the head-coaching duties for the 1946 season. He brought with him an assistant named Bud Wilkinson. The ’46 Sooner team went 6-3 overall and 4-1 in the Big Six, which was good enough to win the league crown. Tatum left OU after one season to take the head position at Maryland. Wilkinson succeeded Tatum, and we all know the rest of that story.

Practically all the glory and all the high national accolades that have come the way of Oklahoma football has been in the 76 years since Wilkinson ascended to the head-coaching position

Seventy-two percent of Oklahoma’s 928 all-time victories, tied for fifth most in college football history, have occurred since Wilkinson became head coach in the late 1940s. Prior to that, the Sooners were 252-135-40 (.637) in the first 52 years of their football history.

Think of it as the foundation on which one of the greatest college football programs of all-time was built.