Bud Wilkinson

The true Sooners tradition began with Bud Wilkinson in 1947. He laid the foundation for perhaps the greatest dynasty in college football history, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, and created the Midland saying "Oklahoma and the Seven Dwarfs" in reference to OU's supremacy over its conference.

Such had been OU's domination of first the Big 7, from 1948 to 1957, and then the Big 8 Conference that the Sooners went from 1947 — Wilkinson's first season as OU's head coach — until 1959 without losing a league game.

One of the reasons Frank Broyles left Missouri for Arkansas after coaching in Columbia, Missouri, for just the 1957 season was the fact he saw little hope other teams in the league could compete with the juggernaut in Norman. While this ultimately proved not to be the case, when OU began to decline in the early 1960s under Wilkinson as Missouri and Nebraska flourished, Broyles' initial fears certainly were not unfounded. Missouri, as an example, went from 1946 until 1960 without beating the Sooners.

Wilkinson's program was astonishingly consistent and well-detailed. And his players served him with unquestioned loyalty. In Oklahoma he was king, having delivered the state from the throes of the Depression and Dust Bowl and into post–World War II football heaven. One wife of an early 1960s OU football player remarked years later, "When Bud walked into a room, everybody just stopped. He was the king."

"You never questioned Wilkinson," said OU's star halfback of the mid-1950s, Tommy McDonald. "He was so big. You never thought about questioning Bud Wilkinson. You would never put that in your mind at all. What Bud said, that was it."

Wearing a gray suit, a tie, and a fedora, Wilkinson was the forerunner of the Dallas Cowboys' Tom Landry sideline look. And the former quarterback and guard modeled himself after his college coach, Bernie Bierman of Minnesota, in the early 1930s.

"He was the most organized coach I ever worked for," said OU's 1953 Outland Trophy winner J.D. Roberts, who was a Wilkinson assistant coach, then an assistant for several other prominent coaches at other schools, and finally head coach of the New Orleans Saints. "Our practices were totally organized, there would be so much time for this, and that, and on down the line.

"I remember during this one meeting he said, 'Football is complicated and it is always easy to omit something in planning.' So he wanted really everyone to think ahead and be prepared and make sure we didn't omit something we needed to get done."

Wilkinson's OU teams claimed three national titles, won six of eight bowl games, and finished first in the conference every year from 1946 to 1959. His teams produced a 47-game winning streak — the longest in college football history — from 1953 to 1957. While what he said was gospel, he rarely had to raise his voice to inspire his players.

"These guys didn't just adore Bud, Bud was their life," said Steve Hatchell, one-time team manager and scout team scrub for Colorado coach Eddie Crowder, Wilkinson's former player at OU. "And so when those guys started to talk about what it meant to be part of that system, [it was something]. I haven't been around every football program in the country. But there's nothing compared to what it meant to that state. It wasn't a state until 1907. ... Everybody looked down on it. It was nothing but a truck stop."

During his final four seasons (1960 through 1963), Oklahoma won only one Big 8 title, in 1962, and Wilkinson failed to beat Texas the last six times he played the Longhorns. He retired from college coaching after the 1963 season, then failed in his 1964 bid for a U.S. Senate seat. He went into sports commentating for ABC and did many of the big games of the era, including the 1971 Game of the Century between Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1969, Wilkinson later became coach of the St. Louis Football Cardinals in 1978, but lasted less than two seasons and returned to broadcasting. He passed away in 1994 at the age of 77.

Barry Switzer

The Barry Switzer coaching era in Norman was separated by a decade and three coaches from Bud Wilkinson's button-down regime. Wilkinson and Switzer were light years apart in their approach to the game and personal temperament.

Despite their different approaches to coaching,...