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Oklahoma football: Five best Sooner coaches who never won a national title

By Chip Rouse

Oct, 1971; USA; FILE PHOTO; Oklahoma Sooners head coach Chuck Fairbanks (center) on the sidelines. Mandatory Credit: Malcolm Emmons-USA TODAY NETWORK
Oct, 1971; USA; FILE PHOTO; Oklahoma Sooners head coach Chuck Fairbanks (center) on the sidelines. Mandatory Credit: Malcolm Emmons-USA TODAY NETWORK /
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General view of the field during the game between the Oklahoma Sooners and Kent State Golden Flashes at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports
General view of the field during the game between the Oklahoma Sooners and Kent State Golden Flashes at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports /

Jim Tatum

Jim Tatum will be best remembered, at least by Oklahoma Sooners fans, as the OU head coach who hired Bud Wilkinson, who succeeded Tatum just one year later.

Tatum came to OU after the difficult World War II years, succeeding Dewey Luster. Tatum and Wilkinson were both assistants at Iowa Pre-Flight school under head coach Don Faurot, who later became head coach and athletic director at Missouri and is credited for inventing the Split-T offense, which his two assistants later incorporated to great success in their head-coaching careers.

Tatum was a two-sport star at the University of North Carolina. He became a football assistant at his alma mater from 1939-41 and head coach in 1942. He left after just one season as the Tar Heels’ head coach to enlist in the Navy during WW II.

Tatum was at OU just for the 1946 season, but he set the stage for Wilkinson to take the team to the highest levels of the sport and a five-year period from 1953 to 1957 that remains today as the longest winning streak in college football history.

In his one season at Oklahoma, the Sooners finished 8-3 overall, 4-1 in the Big Six and tied for first. Tatum left at the end of the 1946 season to become head coach of the Maryland Terrapins. In nine seasons as Maryland head coach, Tatum had a record of 73-15-4, including winning a national championship in 1953 and finishing as a co-champion of the Atlantic Coast Conference three different times.

Tatum probably would have won at Oklahoma too, but at the very least, he helped lay the foundation for one of the greatest decades in the in the history of OU football.

The former Sooner head coach returned to his alma mater at North Carolina as head coach in 1956, but almost four years thereafter, he died, at the age of 46, of complications from an infection.

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