This past season marked the 75th anniversary of Oklahoma's 1950 national championship, the first of the Sooners' seven college football national titles, third-most in the Associated Press poll era.
Prior to the Bowl Championship Series (1998-2013) and College Football Playoff (2014 to present), the top-ranked team in the final Associated Press poll of the season, which began in 1939, was designated as national champion.
Sooners enduring longest national title drought
Only Alabama (12) and Notre Dame (8) had more national championships over that time period than Oklahoma.
The Sooners won their first three national titles under Bud Wilkinson in the decade of the 1950s. Their first was in 1950, and that was followed five years later by back-to-back natties in 1955 and 1956.
Eighteen years passed before Oklahoma would capture another national championship in 1974. Like Wilkinson before him, Barry Switzer's 1974 and 1975 teams were able to do it in back-to-back fashion. The Sooners are one of eight teams to win national championships in consecutive seasons and one of just three to do it multiple times. Alabama has won back-to-back national titles three different times, and Nebraska, like Oklahoma, has done it twice.
Switzer won his third national title as Oklahoma head coach in 1985. Fifteen years later, in 2000, Bob Stoops won a national championship in his second season as the Sooners' head coach. Stoops' team played for the national championship three other times 2003, 2004 and 2008, but lost all three times.
It's been 25 years since an Oklahoma team was crowned as college football national champion, and some would say the Sooners are long overdue, at least by self-proclaimed OU standards. When another national championship celebration might happen is anyone's guess, but the current national title drought is the longest for Oklahoma since earning its first in 1950.
When you examine the big picture, however, Oklahoma sits among pretty exclusive company in the college football all-time hierarchy. Of the current 134 teams that make up the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football, only 27 have won the 89 national championships awarded since 1936, and only eight, including the Sooners, have won as many as four.
And concerning years between national championships, there are teams with multiple titles that have experienced much longer dry spells than Oklahoma's 25-year absence.
It's been 30 year's since Nebraska's 1995 national championship. Texas went 36 years between its 1969 national championship and its most recent in 2005. Ohio State watched 34 years go by between national titles in 1968 and 2002. And then there's Minnesota. The Gophers won the last of their four natties in 1960, and they haven't won another since.
All things considered, Oklahoma still sits firmly in elite company among teams that have experienced the pinnacle of the sport.