Oklahoma Sooners Football: Inside the Numbers of the Bob Stoops Era

As Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops enters his 13th season as the skipper of the Sooner Schooner (that's a bakers' dozen for all you donut-eating, college football coach potatoes), I thought it would be interesting to break down some numbers and see what they say about the Stoops era in Norman.

Stoops' 129 victories in his first 12 seasons makes him the fourth Sooner coach to reach the 100-win plateau. Oklahoma is the only school in the country with more than three coaches who have accomplished this feat.

His overall record of 129-31 and winning percentage of .801 puts him just behind Barry Switzer (157-29-4, .837) and Bud Wilkinson (145-29-4, .826).

The average score of a Bob Stoops-coached football game is a 37-18 Sooner victory.

Oklahoma has the most wins of any BCS team since 1999, Stoops' first year in Norman, and they are the only program to play in all five BCS bowls.

Their four appearances in the championship game and 20 weeks atop the BCS polls are also the best marks in the country.

Stoops seven Big 12 championships more than double any other program in the conference, winning these games by an average of 31-17. That does include the mind boggling 35-7 loss to Kansas State in the 2003 title game.

Oklahoma has a nation's best 36 straight home victories, and Bob Stoops' overall mark of 72-2 at home is unheard of for a BCS school in the age of college football parity. The average home game ends in a 43-13 Sooner stomping.

OU has also sold out every home contest during his tenure, soon to be 75 and counting.

There is no disputing the fact that Bob Stoops has done a remarkable job bringing the Sooners back to national prominence, no small task considering the dismal depths the program had fallen to prior to his arrival.

If he has an Achilles heel, it is that his teams do not play as well on the road as they do at home.

While winning well over 90 percent of their games at Memorial Stadium under Stoops, they have only won 66 percent of the 86 games they have played outside of Norman.

Let's forget the fact that most teams could not win 66 percent of their games regardless of where they play. Seriously, even if the opposing teams failed to show up and the cheerleading squad had to fill in, there are numerous programs that would still struggle to win two-thirds of their games.

But this is Oklahoma and dominance is expected no matter the venue.

There is something to the road game woes perception, though.  A Sooner game out of town only ends in an average score of 31-21. While a 10-point road victory is not that bad, it pales in comparison to the shellacking opponents endure in Norman.

I crunched some numbers on conference opponents, and it was interesting. While on average the Sooners outscored conference foes, except for Nebraska, regardless of the location, the numbers revealed just how much tighter the games became out of town.

Against Texas A&M, Stoops is 10-2. These games end with a home score in Norman of 50-12, but that number shrinks considerably to only a 34-29 Sooner advantage in College Station.

Oklahoma State: 10-2, home score 38-11 but only 36-30 in Stillwater.

Missouri: 5-1 in the regular season and 2-0 in the Big 12 championship; 37-15 in Norman and 28-23 in Columbia.

With Texas Tech, the only Big 12 school besides Texas with more than two victories over a Stoops-coached team, the record is 8-4 overall and a win of 43-16 at home but a virtual 29.16-29  tie in Lubbock. Oklahoma has also lost in their last three road games against Tech. Luckily for the Sooners, Tech travels to Norman for the second straight year due to the scheduling quirks of the new round-robin conference schedule.

Nebraska is the only team to have outscored the Sooners on their home field. In Norman the Cornhuskers were shucked 41-15, but it reversed to 23-20 Nebraska advantage in Lincoln. Bob still had a 6-2 record against the Huskers counting the two Big 12 Championship victories but that 10-3 loss in Lincoln in 2009 may have been the ugliest game of the Stoops era.

I didn't crunch numbers on Baylor because, well, it's Baylor and it just wouldn't be fair.

Texas doesn't really count because even when Oklahoma is the "home" team, they still play in Dallas every year. Last time I checked, Dallas was still IN Texas.

What does this all mean? Well, it could mean I just like numbers.

Or it could mean that, like Dorothy said, there is no place like home, particularly if you are Bob Stoops and the team in Crimson and Cream.

Research was conducted using Soonersports.com.