Oklahoma football: Where does OU rank among best college teams of every decade?

The Oklahoma football program has been in existence for 128 years (the 2023 season will be Team 129, as the athletic department likes to refer to it), but the program didn’t come into its own and become recognized as a national power until Bud Wilkinson’s great 1950s Sooner teams.

Since the 1950s, Oklahoma has had an extended history of success, including seven national championships and a nation-best 50 conference championships. During the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s and the opening decade of the 2000s, Sooner teams were among the very best in the college game.

That begs the question: Where does Oklahoma football fare in a top-10 ranking of every decade beginning in 1950? ESPN college football writer Bill Connelly recently took on the task of diving into that issue and posted an ESPN+ article “examining which teams most thoroughly dominated the sport of college football from decade to decade using SP+ percentile averages for each team and each decade.”

In the words of the people at ESPN, “SP+ is a tempo and opponent-adjusted measurement of what college teams can do to win football games.”

Connelly’s decade-by-decade research began with the 1920s and ranked the best 10 teams in every decade up through and into the first four seasons of the 2020s.