Oklahoma Sooners football
The Oklahoma Sooners football team represents the University of Oklahoma in college football at the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision level in the Southeastern Conference.
The program began in 1895 and is one of the most successful in the nation, having won 960 games and possessing a.723 winning percentage, both sixth all-time. Oklahoma has appeared in the AP poll 921 times, including 101 No. 1 rankings, both third all-time. The program claims seven national championships, 50 conference championships, 169 first-team All-Americans, and seven Heisman Trophy winners. The school has had 29 former players and coaches inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and holds the record for the longest winning streak in Division I history with 47 straight victories. Oklahoma is also the only program with which four coaches have won more than 100 games each.
The Sooners play their home games at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman, Oklahoma. Brent Venables is the head coach and has served since 2022.
History
Early history (1895–1904)
The first football game in the university's history was played on December 14, 1895, 12 years before Oklahoma became a state. The team was organized by John A. Harts, a student from Winfield, Kansas. Oklahoma was shut out 34–0 by a more experienced team from Oklahoma City in what was the Sooners' only game that season. Oklahoma failed to record a first down throughout the entire game, which was played on a field of low prairie grass just northwest of the current site of Holmberg Hall. Several members of the Oklahoma team were injured, including Harts. By the end of the game, Oklahoma had borrowed members from the opposing squad so they would have a full lineup. After that year, Harts left Oklahoma to become a gold prospector.After playing two games without a coach in 1896, a professor named Vernon Louis Parrington became head coach in 1897. Parrington had played football at Harvard. In his four years as head coach, Parrington's teams compiled a 9–2–1 record. After the 1900 season, football began interfering with Parrington's teaching, and he stepped down as head coach. He would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928 at the University of Washington.
The Sooners had three more coaches over the next four seasons, beginning with Fred Roberts, who led the Sooners to a 3–2 record in 1901. Mark McMahon followed, finishing 11–7–3 in his two years as coach in 1902 and 1903. Fred Ewing followed McMahon, achieving a 4–3–1 record in 1904. The 1904 season marked the first game of the Bedlam Series between Oklahoma and in-state rival Oklahoma A&M. The game was played on November 6 at Mineral Wells Park in Guthrie, Oklahoma, with Oklahoma winning 75–0.
Bennie Owen era (1905–1926)
After a decade of football, the program acquired its first long-term head coach in Bennie Owen, a former quarterback of the undefeated 1899 Kansas Jayhawks, led by coach Fielding H. Yost. Owen had previously coached under Yost at Michigan, and was the head coach of the Bethany Swedes teams that had defeated Oklahoma in 1903 and 1904.Owen's first two years at Oklahoma were spent between Norman and Arkansas City since Oklahoma lacked a large enough budget to employ him all year. As a result of these budgetary limitations, Owen would occasionally schedule up to three road games in a single short trip, exhausting his players in the process. However, even early in his tenure, Owen's teams found success. In 1905, Oklahoma won a 2–0 victory over rival Texas, its first in eight tries. In 1908, the Sooners went 8–1–1, losing only to the undefeated Kansas Jayhawks. Owen's 1908 team relied on hand-offs to large runners, as the forward pass was just becoming common. In contrast, his 1911 team had several small and fast players that the quarterback would pass to directly. That team finished 8–0.
The Sooners had undefeated seasons in 1915 and 1918. In 1920, Oklahoma moved to the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association after five seasons in the Southwest Conference, of which it was a founding member. In their new conference, OU went 6–0–1 and won the conference title. Owen retired after the 1926 season. During his 22-year career at Oklahoma, he went 122–54–16, won three conference championships, and achieved four undefeated seasons. In 1951, the inaugural year of the College Football Hall of Fame, he became Oklahoma's first inductee.
Between Owen and Wilkinson (1927–1946)
In 1927, Adrian Lindsey became Oklahoma's first new head coach in over two decades. Like Owen, Lindsey had played football at Kansas and been the head coach at Bethany College. However, he was unable to achieve Owen's success, resigning quietly after a five-year tenure. The Sooners achieved a notable win in 1930, defeating Nebraska 20–7, the Cornhuskers' worst in-conference loss in two decades. Despite this achievement, Lindsey finished an inconsistent stint in Norman with a 19–19–6 record.Following Lindsey's resignation, Owen, who had remained Oklahoma's athletic director after his retirement from coaching, hired Vanderbilt backfield coach Lewie Hardage as head coach. Upon his hire, Hardage emphasized speed by fabricating new lighter uniforms and trimming the grass on Owen Field. However, in three seasons he failed to produce a successful team. His final record at Oklahoma was 11–12–4, making him the first coach in program history with a losing record aside from John A. Harts, who only coached a single game.
Although the next head coach, Lawrence "Biff" Jones, went an unspectacular 9–6–3 across two seasons, his impact on the athletic department's administration and finances was significant. Jones was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954 following a career that also included coaching stints at Army, LSU, and Nebraska. After Jones' departure, assistant coach Tom Stidham became head coach. In 1938, Stidham led the team to a 10–1 record, a fourth-place finish in the final AP poll, and the first bowl game in school history. However, the Sooners lost the Orange Bowl to Tennessee. Although Stidham's other teams would not be as successful, he left Oklahoma after four seasons with a.750 winning percentage, the highest of any coach since Vernon Louis Parrington.
Stidham left for Marquette in 1941, and assistant coach Dewey "Snorter" Luster succeeded him. After Luster's first season, a 6–3 campaign, the United States entered World War II. Many players left the team to join the military. The Sooners regressed to a 3–5–2 record in 1942, but rebounded to finish 7–2 in 1943 and 6–3–1 in 1944. Luster stepped down after the 1945 season due to ill health. He recorded a 27–18–3 record in five seasons at Oklahoma, winning two conference titles. His teams never finished below second place in the Big Six.
After Luster's resignation, several candidates were interviewed for the head coaching job, Jim Tatum among them. Tatum was joined at his interview by his assistant, Bud Wilkinson, with whom athletic director Lawrence Haskell was more impressed. However, it was decided that usurping Tatum and giving the job to Wilkinson would be unethical. OU hired Tatum as head coach, with Wilkinson joining the staff as an assistant. The Sooners went 8–3 in 1946, including a 73–12 Bedlam Series win and a victory over NC State in the Gator Bowl. Tatum left Oklahoma after one season to accept the head coach position at Maryland.
Bud Wilkinson era (1947–1963)
Following Tatum's departure, Bud Wilkinson was promoted to head coach.In his first season, the Sooners went 7–2–1 and shared the conference title with Kansas for the second year in a row. Over the next two years, Oklahoma lost only a single game and went undefeated in conference play, winning two straight Sugar Bowls. In 1949, despite going undefeated and winning the Sugar Bowl, the Sooners were not awarded the national championship, which went to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
In 1950, Wilkinson guided the Sooners to their first national championship, though they lost the Sugar Bowl to Bear Bryant's Kentucky Wildcats. At the time, the AP and Coaches Polls selected their champions prior to bowl games. The loss snapped a 31-game winning streak that dated back to 1948's season-opening loss to Santa Clara. The team's success began to influence the culture of football at the university. "People talk a lot about the tradition of football at Oklahoma. The person who started that tradition was Bud Wilkinson," Oklahoma native and Hall of Fame wide receiver Steve Largent later said. In 1951, while seeking funding to improve the school, university president George Lynn Cross told the Oklahoma legislature that he "would like to build a university of which the football team would be proud."
In 1952, Oklahoma had its first Heisman Trophy winner in halfback Billy Vessels, a local player from Cleveland, Oklahoma. Vessels became the first thousand-yard rusher to win the Heisman and scored 18 touchdowns for the Sooners, who finished 8–1–1. Their only loss that season came on the road to Notre Dame. The 1953 team would open the season with a loss to the Fighting Irish and a tie with Pitt.
47-game winning streak
The Sooners went undefeated for the remainder of the 1953 season, culminating in an Orange Bowl victory over national champion Maryland, coached by Jim Tatum. OU went 10–0 in 1954 and 11–0 in 1955, concluding the latter season with another Orange Bowl win over Tatum's Terrapins. The Sooners won the national championship in 1955 and 1956, when they went 10–0, including a 40–0 rout of Notre Dame that marked the 35th win in the streak. From 1954 to 1956, Jimmy Harris made 25 starts at quarterback for the Sooners and never lost a game. Along with Chuck Ealey of Toledo, Harris is one of only two quarterbacks in FBS history to start at least 25 games without losing.At the start of the 1957 season, with the streak standing at 40 games, speculation arose that the team was not as good as it had been in previous years, having lost 18 lettermen from 1956. Wilkinson commented that "this year we'll have to work faster and organize better than ever before." The Sooners won their first seven games that year, but fell to Notre Dame on November 16, suffering their first defeat in more than four years.
The record of 47 consecutive wins has never been seriously threatened; since it ended, no FBS school has achieved a streak longer than 35 wins. During the streak, the Sooners outscored their opponents 1620–269 and recorded 23 shutouts. In addition to their back-to-back national championships during the streak, the Sooners won 14 straight conference titles from 1946 to 1959, one under Jim Tatum and 13 under Wilkinson. Oklahoma went undefeated in conference play from November 23, 1946, to October 31, 1959, their record only blemished by two ties.