Sooners to Start New Era

To look at new Oklahoma coach John Blake now, you could easily mistake him for a player. His broad shoulders and athletic stride mimic the swagger and confidence so often displayed by young college athletes basking in their physical and egotistical primes.

But only a year ago, the picture was not so pretty. Rather than lean muscle mass and subtle ripples, Blake’s physique had rounded out to a robust 340 pounds. Perhaps he felt right at home among the massive bodies he was tending to as defensive line coach for the Dallas Cowboys, but when Blake showed up to interview for the top job at OU in 1995, his weight and sloppy appearance may have cost him the position that went to Howard Schnellenberger.

So Blake buckled down, and over a four-month period lost 126 pounds. It was an impressive whipping into shape of something that was getting a bit out of hand.

The situation at OU, however, has been way out of hand for quite some time, and it will take all the whipping, stripping, molding and scolding Blake can muster to resurrect a Sooners program that has all but vanished from the elite of the college football landscape, where it reigned supreme for so long.

Consider:

--Over nearly the last half-century, dating to 1950, the Sooners have won six national championships, more than anybody else.

--OU holds the NCAA record for consecutive victories with 47, a mark set from 1953 to 1957.

--The Sooners have had 50 consensus All-Americans since 1950, the most of any school.

Going back 100 years, Oklahoma has had only nine losing seasons.

Indeed, being good -- make that terrific, wonderful, incredible, stunning -- is the Sooners’ past. But being horrendous -- at least by OU’s own ethereal standards -- is the Sooners’ present.

It’s indisputable: Oklahoma has suffered a pratfall of unspeakable scope and unfathomable dimension. The school that once won 12 consecutive conference championships under Bud Wilkinson and 12 more titles under Barry Switzer hasn’t won one since 1987; the school with all those national titles hasn’t won one since 1985. Over the past two seasons, the Sooners are 11-11-1.

There was a feeling “that we were bullet-proof,” says Donnie Duncan, the athletic director for almost 10 years until his resignation last spring to become director of operations for the new Big 12 Conference. “Then, when things started happening, we considered it just a bump in the road.” Turns out, of course, that the Sooners’ big shots were twice wrong. The bullets, in fact, went directly to the heart of Sooners football and that bump in the road jarred everything loose.

Everything.

This explains why the Sooners this fall are on their third head coach in three seasons, when they employed the same number of men to lead them to a 244-64-7 record from 1967 to 1993. It all comprises a rather dubious welcome mat for Blake, especially when you consider his thin resume: age 35, never before a head coach, never before a defensive or offensive coordinator. His three-season stint as defensive line coach with the Cowboys is really the only eye-catching stop in his coaching career. At least Blake’s predecessors, the flamboyant Schnellenberger and the colorless Gary Gibbs, brought some solid credentials to the table.

Then again, if high qualifications are any barometer of future success, it makes all the sense in the world that Oklahoma decided on Blake. Gibbs (44-23-2 in six years, light-years from being good enough by OU standards) and Schnellenberger (who lasted one tumultuous campaign) did nothing to distinguish themselves during their tenures and, if anything, only further pricked the festering wound that OU football has become.