Oklahoma Sooners among The Athletic's top 5 football programs since 2000

USA Today

a day ago

It was December of 1998 when new Oklahoma Sooners athletic director Joe Castiglione and the program introduced former Florida defensive coordinator Bob Stoops as the next head football coach at OU. Stoops replaced John Blake, who'd led the program through three rough years before being fired by Castiglione following the 1998 season.
However, Stoops was really the hopeful replacement for the legendary Barry Switzer, who had resigned after the 1988 season. There were ten dark years in Norman, as the program shuffled through head coaches Gary Gibbs, Howard Schnellenberger, and Blake from 1989 to 1998, losing an unacceptable number of games in the process and fading from the national spotlight. None of those coaches was a suitable heir to Switzer, who had been OU's head coach from 1973 to 1988 and won three national championships. Switzer had been at OU since 1966, serving as the offensive coordinator before his promotion to head coach.
Castiglione and the Sooners believed they had their next successful head coach in Stoops, and they were more than right. What has followed is 26 years where Oklahoma has been back in the spotlight, typically among the nation's elite teams from 1999 to 2021. Although Stoops retired after the 2016 season, the success he set in motion has positioned OU at the forefront of the sport.
The Athletic took on the daunting task of ranking the best college football programs of the 21st century last week, and obviously, the Sooners were very high on the list. Oklahoma was ranked third, falling behind only Alabama and Ohio State. Though the list doesn't include Stoops' first year at the helm, it includes the rest of his head coaching career, and that of Lincoln Riley and Brent Venables.
Stoops led the Sooners to the first national championship of the 21st century, with a perfect season in 2000. The year concluded with a win over Florida State in the title game, giving Oklahoma a total of seven national championships.
Although Oklahoma hasn't won it all since then, it has been among the top-performing programs in America over the last quarter-century. The Sooners have played for three more national titles and made four trips to the four-team College Football Playoff. The program won four Heisman Trophies and had four other players finish as finalists for the award. OU won 14 conference championships, and a bevy of All-Americans put the Sooners as a no-doubt top-five program since 2000.
The standard was set in Norman well before Stoops arrived. Coaches such as Bennie Owen, Bud Wilkinson, Chuck Fairbanks, and Switzer defined what it meant to win in college football and at OU.
However, after one of the worst decades of Oklahoma Football in the 90s, it was Stoops who quickly showed that he and the program could meet that standard again. Oklahoma Football is still feeling the effects of his excellence over a quarter of a century later.
Yes, the program has had some tough times lately. The handoff from Stoops to Riley looked so good for so many years, but the program was quietly slipping under Riley's watch. When he bolted to Southern California, Venables was hired to take the reins. It's been a rough go under Venables at times, with the only two losing seasons since the Blake era happening under his watch. But Venables had no easy task taking over for Riley, and he's doing his best to get the program back to its Stoops-era winning ways.
He has the defense ready to contend, but the offense took a hit in 2024 with a bevy of injuries limiting the team's potential. But Venables and his staff have positioned themselves to be much better in 2025.
It's a big year for Venables and a big year for this program in 2025. Though the straits aren't as dire as they were when Stoops took over in 1999, Oklahoma's backs are against the wall this season. However, the blueprint is there for the fourth-year head coach, who leads a program that has defied the odds plenty of times before, and is clearly one of the elite programs in all of college football.
Contact/Follow us @SoonersWire on X, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Oklahoma news, notes, and opinions. You can also follow Aaron on X @Aaron_Gelvin.