Oklahoma football: What’s the historical significance of this Sooner season?
By Chip Rouse
Through the first seven games of the 2022 season, the Oklahoma football Sooners are barely holding their heads above water, sporting a score card that shows a highly unusual four up and three down.
Even more atypical is the fact Oklahoma is just 1-3 in conference games and in danger of finishing below .500 in Big 12 games for the first time since the 1998 season, when the OU team coached by John Blake ended the year with a 3-5 mark in league play.
Bob Stoops’ 2009 Oklahoma team was 4-3 after the first seven games, but two of those losses came early against nonconference opponents (BYU and Miami by a combined two points). That team, quarterbacked by Landry Jones in place of the injured Sam Bradford, finished out the season with an 8-5 overall record and 5-3 against Big 12 opponents.
Entering its eighth game of the season, ironically against Iowa State. Blake’s 1998 Sooner team was coming off an extremely rare five-game losing streak, something that has happened only one other time in Oklahoma football history (in 1961, when OU lost its first five games of the season). The 1998 team managed to finish the season strong, however, claiming victories in three of its final four games after starting conference play with four straight losses.
Oklahoma has been the most dominant team in the 27-year history of the Big 12 Conference. The Sooners’ 14 Big 12 championships are 11 more than the next closest team, and their .759 winning percentage in conference games matches Oklahoma’s all-time win percentage in 108 seasons as a member of a conference.
Which brings us to the current season and why what the Sooners do the remainder of the 2022 campaign is of historical significance. Only seven times in 108 conference seasons has Oklahoma lost more than three conference games in a season.
When you stop and think about it, that is an extraordinary record. But with one more conference loss that number becomes eight times and the first in 25 seasons, which in and of itself is pretty remarkable.
Only 12 times since 1915, when Oklahoma joined the Southwest Conference, have the Sooners finished with a losing conference record. Four of those seasons came in consecutive years between 1995 and 1998, when Howard Schnellenberger (1995) and Blake (1996-98) coached the Sooners.
Blakes’ 1997 OU team owns the record for the most conference losses in a season at six.
The 2022 Sooners are 1-3 in the Big 12 with five conference games remaining, three of which are on the road. You can do the math yourself and see why the next five games are of historical importance to this proud college football brand