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According to ESPN’s Bill Connelly (ESPN+), the 1956 Oklahoma Sooners football team is the 25th most influential college football team of all time.
Connelly released the first half of his list of the 30 most influential college football teams on Wednesday, unveiling teams ranked 16-30. The 1956 Sooners landed at No. 25.
Of course, this team was coached by the legendary Bud Wilkinson, and was part of OU’s record-setting 47-game winning streak. The team went 10-0 (6-0 in the Big Seven) and won the national championship for the second year in a row.
Here’s what Connelly had to say about the 1956 Sooners.
Step 1: A coach at a middleweight (or lower) school crafts a game-changing innovation.
Step 2: A few years later, a coach with greater recruiting prowess and a better roster adopts the innovation and destroys the innovator with his own invention.
It’s a story that has played out many times in college football’s history, and this was a pretty clear case of it. Taught all the ins and outs of Faurot’s Split-T, Wilkinson used it with increasingly dominant effect. Oklahoma went 31-2 from 1948 to 1950, winning its first national title in 1950. And starting with a 19-14 win over Texas in 1953 — and perhaps with a bit of help from a player-payment slush fund that would earn NCAA punishment on a couple of occasions — the Sooners ripped off a record-setting 47-game winning streak. – Connelly, ESPN
The Sooners reached a level of dominance that few other teams ever have. Running Wilkinson’s iconic Split-T offense, the team outscored its opponents 466 to 51 over the 10-game season.
The one game that season that wasn’t a complete blowout was a 27-19 win on the road against Colorado. The 1956 Sooners pitched six shutouts, and only four teams scored on them all season. The defense held all ten opponents under 20 points….
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/1956-oklahoma-among-most-influential-100032147.html
Author : Sooners Wire
Publish date : 2024-06-13 10:00:32
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