Oklahoma football: Historically, OU well overdue for national championship
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma football program has won seven national championships in the past 73 seasons, but it has been 23 years since OU’s most recent national title.
The Sooners’ seven national titles is tied for the third most in the Associated Press poll era. Since OU’s first national title team in 1950 under Bud Wilkinson, Sooner teams have averaged a national championship about every 10 seasons, but the 23 seasons since the last one is the longest period of time between championships.
And given that the Sooners are not likely to contend for the top prize in the land this season and will be moving to the much stronger Southeastern Conference next season, it’s probably going to be a while longer — and likely a long while — before Oklahoma brings home another national championship trophy.
Although Oklahoma has not won a national championship since the undefeated 13-0 Sooner teams in Bob Stoops’ second season as head coach, OU has played in the national championship game or been in a position to play for the national championship at least five times since 2000.
The Sooners played LSU in the BCS National Championship in the 2003 season and made it back again the following year, when they squared off against No. 1-ranked USC. Four years later, in 2008, it was No. 1 Florida facing No. 2 Oklahoma in that season’s BCS National Championship game.
Unfortunately, the Sooners came up short in all three of those subsequent national title games after winning it all in 2000.
In 2014, the College Football Playoff replaced the BCS format in determining the national champion at the highest level of college football. Oklahoma was not one of the four teams to make it into the playoff the first season but did make a CFP appearance in four of the next five seasons, including three consecutive years from 2017 to 2019. The four Sooner CFP teams, however, failed to make it out of the semifinal round.
Of Oklahoma’s seven national championships, four of them were in consecutive seasons (1955 and ’56 and 1973 and ’74.
Five seasons separated the 1950 and 1955 national championship seasons. It was another 17 years before OU won its fourth (1973) followed by its fifth national title (1974). A dozen more years passed before the Sooners finished the season ranked No. 1 and celebrated national championship number six in 1986. Fourteen years later, Stoops lead Oklahoma to the school’s seventh national championship season.
At least one other time, Oklahoma might have won a national championship had it been able to defeat an undermanned Arkansas in the 1978 Orange Bowl.
The Sooners were ranked No. 2 coming into the bowl game against Arkansas, and the Razorbacks’ head coach Lou Holtz had suspended the team’s top two running backs the week leading up to the game. Notre Dame had defeated No. 1 Texas in the Cotton Bowl earlier in the day, clearing the way for OU to capture the national championship with a win over the Razorbacks.
Oklahoma received the opening kickoff in the game and fumbled inside its 10-yard line on the third play of the game. Arkansas immediately scored to take a 7-0 lead and never trailed after that. Backup running back Roland Sales rambled for 207 yards in leading the Razorbacks to a 31-6 victory and one of the biggest upsets in bowl history.
The moral of all the this is that national championships in football or any other collegiate sport are prized achievements and extremely hard to come by. Oklahoma owns seven of them in football and has been in position for that many more. After all, at least 70 percent of the teams that compete at the Football Bowl Subdivision level would cherish being able to hoist just one national title trophy.