Oklahoma football: Sooners are No. 2 winningest program of 2000s

The Oklahoma football program has 934 wins in 128 years of organized football. That ranks as the seventh most wins in the long and rich history of college football.

On a win-percentage basis, however, the Sooners rank fifth with an all-time winning percentage of .725. Only Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama and Notre Dame have better all-time winning percentages, and that’s pretty impressive company.

OU football has won from the very beginning, which in the Sooners’ case kicked off for the very first time in 1895. Oklahoma lost its only game in its inaugural season but did not have another losing season for 26 consecutive years.

Bennie Owen’s 1915 Sooner team delivered a perfect 10-0 record, the first of what would be 41 seasons of at least 10 Oklahoma football wins, second to only Alabama (42).

Oklahoma ranks supreme in what is considered the modern era of college football (1946 to present). No college team has more wins over that span than the 670 collected by the Sooners. Alabama is the next closest team with 657 wins.

We can’t talk about winning college football teams with referencing the longest consecutive games win streak of 47 games, which is owned by Bud Wilkinson’s powerhouse 1950s Oklahoma teams. The Sooners strung together what might be an unbreakable NCAA record 47 straight wins from 1953 until late in the 1957 season. Oklahoma also has had win streaks of 31 games (1948-50) and 28 games (1973-75).

Over a four-year stretch in the late 1990s, Oklahoma suffered through a rare down cycle in its long gridiron history, including three straight losing seasons when the Sooners won no more than five games. Bob Stoops came to the rescue in 1999 and returned the proud Oklahoma football program to its winning ways.

In his second season at the OU helm, Stoops went undefeated at 13-0 and won the school’s seventh national championship in football. Since the turn of the century, the Sooners have won 245 games and own the second-best winning percentage in college football (245-60, .803).

The Ohio State Buckeyes’ lead all of college football so far this century with a record of 248-48, .838).

Stadium Talk, a sports website that covers the past, present and future of sports around the world, recently ranked the Oklahoma football program as No. 6 out of 65 Power Five teams “in terms of overall program strength, with an emphasis placed on how the programs have done since the start of the College Football Playoff in 2014.”

Although Brent Venables is only in his second season as Oklahoma head coach, he knows what winning feels and looks like at OU, having served 13 seasons under Stoops as the team’s co-defensive coordinator and defensive coordinator. In Venables’ earlier stint in Norman, Oklahoma compiled a record of 139-34, .803 in 13 seasons along with seven Big 12 championships and a conference record of 84-21.

Despite a disappointing 6-7 record last season, Oklahoma’s first losing season since the 1998 season, the wide expectation is that Venables will get the Sooner Schooner back on track in Year 2 as the Sooners’ head coach