A one-sided story.

Byline: Ron Bellamy The Register-Guard

Oklahoma's football history - and there was a University of Oklahoma football team even before Oklahoma was a state - can be viewed chronologically, era by fabled era.

It can be viewed against the backdrop of the greatest programs in college football, because Oklahoma is one of them.

Or, oddly enough, it can be viewed from the distant perspective of the Oregon Ducks, the often-struggling program from the Willamette Valley that, from time to time during the OU glory years, crossed paths with the Sooners in the manner of a bewildered and embattled Forrest Gump, to be defeated narrowly, or defeated outrageously, but defeated always.

Oregon and Oklahoma have met five times on the football field, all in Norman, Okla., and all Sooner victories, by an aggregate score of 184-17.

Now, you might dismiss such history as just that, history, with no bearing on the Holiday Bowl matchup between the 10-1 Ducks and the 7-4 Sooners on Dec. 29 in San Diego.

But you also need to understand this:

With Oklahoma football, history has been powerful and timeless, if sometimes tarnished.

History is seven national championships, between 1950 and 2000. History is 39 conference championships, and 23 bowl victories. History is four Heisman Trophy winners, and 141 All-Americans, and 63 national award-winners, and 95 weeks ranked No. 1 in The Associated Press poll.

History is more wins since the end of World War II (512) than any program in the nation. More than Nebraska, Penn State, Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame.

History is coach Bud Wilkinson, and Chuck Fairbanks, and Barry Switzer, and now Bob Stoops.

History is the Selmon brothers on defense, and running backs Steve Owens, Greg Pruitt, Joe Washington, Billy Sims and now Adrian Peterson. History is the Oklahoma wishbone and the Sooner schooner and "Sooner Magic."

Then again, history is also five major NCAA infraction cases in football between 1956 and 1988 - the last such case at OU - resulting in six total years of probation, five years of postseason bans and various other penalties.

(From 1956 through the present, Oregon football has been found guilty of major NCAA infractions twice - in 1981, stemming from the phony credits scandal at several schools, and last year for violations in the recruitment of running back J.J. Arrington, resulting in a two-year probation and other penalties.)

Oklahoma's football history can be viewed from different perspectives, but that history brings an undeniable significance to a game such as the Holiday Bowl.

Here's Oklahoma's history, through the eyes of the Ducks.

Oklahoma, 6-0, 1958

The first time Oregon played Oklahoma, Bud Wilkinson, the dignified Minnesotan, was in his 12th of 17 seasons as the OU coach, en route to a career record of 145-29-4 and status as a national coaching icon.

By 1958, the Sooners had won three national titles under Wilkinson, as voted in The Associated Press poll - the school's first title in 1950, followed by back-to-back crowns in 1955 and 1956.

By 1958, Wilkinson had coached OU's first Heisman Trophy winner, running back Billy Vessels in 1950.

By 1958, Wilkinson's teams had won 31 straight games from 1948-50, and set a major college record with 47 straight wins from 1953-57.

When the Ducks arrived in Norman on Oct. 4, the top-ranked Sooners had won 51 of their past 52 games. They would go 10-1 that season, with a 21-6 win over Syracuse in the Orange Bowl.

As it turned out, the Ducks would give OU one of its toughest games that year.

Under coach Len Casanova, the Ducks had ended the 1957 season with an inspiring 10-7 loss to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. "Mighty Oregon," wrote Register-Guard sports editor Dick Strite, in his lead to that story.

But 1958 would be an odd year for the Ducks - a 4-6 record in what would be one of only two losing seasons in an 11-year stretch under Cas.

That might have been the greatest Oregon defense ever - Oregon opponents scored only 50 points all season, 23 in one game by Rose Bowl-bound Cal. All four Oregon wins were shutouts. Alas, four of Oregon's six losses were by shutouts, three by 6-0, plus a 2-0 loss at Miami in the season finale.

The only score in the OU game came late in the second quarter, after the Sooners recovered an Oregon fumble on the Oregon 17, which set up a fourth-down, nine-yard touchdown pass. The Ducks recorded more first downs, 13-7, more rushing yards, 174-129, and more passing yards, 87-27. They reached the OU 22, 28, 26 and 20.

They just couldn't score.

That would be Wilkinson's last 10-win season; he resigned after the 1963 season and ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican but lost. He served as an ABC analyst for more than a decade, coached the St. Louis Cardinals for two years, and later served as a consultant to President Nixon and was a member of the White House staff.

Wilkinson died of heart failure in 1994, at age 77.

On Wilkinson's watch, the NCAA twice cited Oklahoma for major infractions in football - recruiting and extra benefits violations - with the most severe penalty a one-year TV ban and postseason ban in 1960.

But he's more vividly remembered as one of the most respected coaches of his era, a coach who, according to OU, graduated 87.2 percent of his players.

Oklahoma, 17-0, 1966

Longtime assistant Gomer Jones succeeded Wilkinson as coach and athletic director and coached two nondescript seasons before resigning that post; he was followed by Jim Mackenzie, who made his debut in the 1966 season opener for both Oklahoma and Oregon.

The Sooners were unranked. Pending the Holiday Bowl, which pits No. 6 Oregon against an unranked Sooners team, the '66 game represents the only time Oregon has played an OU team that wasn't ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in the nation.

The Sooners scored all the points in the third quarter, starting when Eddie Hinton returned a punt 63 yards for a touchdown. That Oregon team gave up 20 points just twice, but the Ducks went only 3-7 in Casanova's last year as head coach.

Meanwhile, the Sooners went 6-4, upset two bowl teams and Mackenzie was named Big Eight coach of the year. However, after the season, at age 37, Mackenzie died of a massive heart attack.

He was replaced by Chuck Fairbanks, who produced Heisman Trophy-winning running back Steve Owens in 1967.

Fairbanks led the Sooners through 1972, with a record of 52-15-1. At the suggestion of assistant coach Barry Switzer, Fairbanks implemented the wishbone offense that identified Oklahoma football for the next 20 years.

Oklahoma, 68-3, 1972

In 1971, the Sooners went 11-1, including a rout of Auburn in the Sugar Bowl, and their only loss is considered perhaps the greatest college football game ever played.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1971, on national television, top-ranked Nebraska came from behind to defeat No. 2 Oklahoma, 35-31, in Lincoln. Great players, great plays, great stakes. A classic.

In 1972, Fairbanks' last season in Norman, the Sooners were again a force. They went 11-1 and shut out Penn State in the Sugar Bowl. Running back Greg Pruitt finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting.

Sure, the '72 Ducks had some talent, in the first of Dick Enright's two seasons as the Oregon coach: Quarterback Dan Fouts, tight end Russ Francis, running back Don Reynolds, lineman Tim Stokes.

But they were no match for No. 2 Oklahoma that Sept. 13, not that they necessarily saw that coming.

As recounted in "Oregon Ducks Football, 100 years of Glory," UO quarterbacks coach Don Read remembered being in the press box that day and excitedly yelling down at Enright: "They're only going to rush three people! Fouts will kill 'em."

Well, maybe not; it became what was then the worst defeat in Oregon history. (It's now No. 2, behind a 66-0 loss to Washington in 1974.) By the way, a week after losing 68-3 at Norman, the Ducks lost 65-20 to UCLA in the Rose Bowl. You do the math.

Against the Sooners, it was 35-0 at halftime, 61-0 after three quarters.

An 18-year-old freshman, Joe Washington, merely a backup to Pruitt and one of seven OU freshmen who played that day, rushed for two touchdowns; the Sooners rushed for 609 yards, amid 731 total yards, and had 37 first downs, then an OU record, and still No. 2 on the OU list, behind 38 first downs in a 1988 game against Kansas State.

Oregon finally scored - its first points ever against Oklahoma - on a 47-yard field goal with 10:09 remaining, cutting the score to 61-3 as OU fans booed the loss of the shutout. But Oklahoma pushed in another score, despite the fact that Fairbanks used 64 of the 115 players available on the double-row of OU benches.

The following week, the Sooners made the cover of Sports Illustrated, Pruitt running past Ducks.

"I've never seen so many guys," Fouts said afterward. "We're not as bad as the score. Their first-stringers couldn't have scored that much, because they would've got tired."

Noted UO fullback Jim Anderson: "If there's another No. 1 team in the the country this year, I don't want to know about 'em."

Ah, poor Ducks. That year, they also faced Southern California - and gave a better showing, losing 18-0, USC's lowest scoring total of the season - and those Trojans are considered one of the great college teams of all time, with sophomore tailback Anthony Davis, fullback Sam Cunningham, tight end Charles Young, receivers Lynn Swann and Edesel Garrison.

USC was undefeated that year and garnered every first-place vote in the AP and UPI polls, unprecedented; the Sooners finished No. 2.

There is a postscript to that Oklahoma game: The Sooners were ruled to have used an ineligible player, due to a doctored transcript, and officially the Ducks won by forfeit, 2-0.

"Does that mean we get the game ball back?" asked Hal Cowan, then Oregon's sports information director.

A year later, Oklahoma was cited for major NCAA infractions in football under Fairbanks - extra benefits, improper recruiting inducements, academic fraud, unethical conduct and more - resulting in a two-year TV ban and two-year bowl ban, plus other penalties.

Oklahoma, 62-7, 1975

It was a payday for cash-short Oregon - $125,000 to play the top-ranked Sooners in Norman again. The Sooners, in their third year under flamboyant coach Barry Switzer, had won the 1974 national championship (with Joe Washington finishing third in the Heisman voting), going 11-0.

The NCAA ban kept Oklahoma out of a bowl game, but not off the top of The AP poll.

And the Sooners would win the mythical national championship again in 1975, going 11-1, and moving from third to first in the final AP poll after Ohio State and Texas A&M lost bowl games.

(Oklahoma won the national title again, for the last time under Switzer, in 1985).

The 1975 OU team was led by defensive tackle Lee Roy Selmon, who won both the Outland and Lombardi trophies, and who was joined as a consensus all-American by brother Dewey, at middle guard, and by defensive end Jimbo Elrod, and by Washington, who finished fifth in the Heisman voting.

"Oklahoma is just another opponent for us," Read, who had succeeded Enright as the UO head coach, told Oregon Club boosters early that week. "We're not scared, we're not shaking, we're not backing down. You can expect the kind of effort you'll be proud of."

On the other hand, Jerry Pettibone, then the Oklahoma recruiting coordinator and later head coach at Oregon State, was citing the 60-player limit for games and noting, "If we could suit up 120 people, we could hold the score down. But Barry's pushing Washington for the Heisman Trophy. He'd like him to get 200 yards and two or three touchdowns."

The Sooners jumped ahead, 10-0, and then something historic happened:

With 1:02 remaining in the first quarter, Oregon quarterback Jack Henderson hit Greg Bauer for a five-yard touchdown pass, capping a 35-yard drive set up by a blocked punt. After nearly 195 minutes of football, spread over three games and almost one quarter, the Ducks had a touchdown against the Sooners.

However, it was their last on that afternoon; the Sooners scored the game's next 52 points. For the record, Washington had an off-game, just 57 yards on eight carries, but Horace Ivory, one of 13 Sooners to carry the ball, rushed for 104 yards and two touchdowns on just nine carries, and a freshman running back named Billy Sims rushed 10 times for 51 yards.

In 1978, Sims became the third Sooner to win the Heisman Trophy.

Amazingly, that wasn't the low point of the season for the Ducks. A week later, they lost their home opener to San Jose State, 5-0, which led UO president William Boyd to state that he'd "rather be whipped in a public square than watch a game like that."

Switzer, who came from a hardscrabble background and titled his autobiography "The Bootlegger's Boy," coached at Oklahoma through 1988, with a record of 157-29-4, a winning percentage of .837, Oklahoma's winningest coach. His teams won 11 games seven times.

Now retired, Switzer lives near the OU campus in which the football team is headquartered in the Barry Switzer Center. He's a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, as are Wilkinson and almost 20 former OU players.

Switzer's tenure was never dull - in 1976, Texas coach Darrel Royal offered Switzer and an assistant coach $10,000 if they could each pass a lie detector test regarding an alleged OU spy at Texas practices - and there were NCAA violations as well.

Under Switzer, the Sooners were reprimanded by the NCAA for infractions in 1980, but the hammer came down in late 1988 - three years of probation, a two-year bowl ban, scholarship reductions and recruiting restrictions - for unethical conduct, recruiting violations and lack of institutional control.

In that period, too, there were off-field incidents that made national headlines. As summarized in the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia, one Sooner shot another, three others were charged with rape and starting quarterback Charles Thompson was arrested for allegedly selling cocaine. Sports Illustrated published a cover photo of Thompson, wearing handcuffs and a prison-orange jumpsuit, and Oklahoma seemed to represent all college football programs gone wrong.

Switzer resigned in June 1989, later coaching the Dallas Cowboys. By Sooner standards, some relatively bleak seasons would follow.

Oklahoma, 31-7, 2004

Switzer's resignation, and Oklahoma's probation and recruiting penalties, triggered a decline in OU's football fortunes (though there were certainly some seasons that, by Oregon standards, would have been considered hugely successful).

Switzer's successor, Gary Gibbs, was 44-23-2 over six seasons, winning nine games twice, and two bowl games, but he resigned after going 6-6 in 1994, and was replaced by Howard Schnellenberger, who was succeeded after one season by John Blake, who had three straight losing seasons, the first time that had happened at OU since 1922-24.

In 1999, when OU hired Bob Stoops, the assistant head coach and defensive coordinator at Florida, the Sooners had endured five straight non-winning seasons, the longest such streak in school history.

It took Stoops a year to get Oklahoma back on top, with a national championship in 2000 - its first under the Bowl Championship Series format - that featured a 13-0 record and a 13-2 win over Florida State in the Orange Bowl.

Including that season, the Sooners averaged 12 wins a year for five straight years, and when the Ducks went to Oklahoma last year - as part of a home-and-home contract that will see the Sooners visit Autzen Stadium next Sept. 16 - they faced not only a second-ranked OU team with the incumbent Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Jason White, but one that would win 12 games again before losing to Southern California in the Orange Bowl, Oklahoma's third national title game in five years.

The Ducks kept it close, trailing 10-0 at halftime and 17-7 after Kellen Clemens' 30-yard pass to Dante Rosario with 4:15 remaining in the third quarter.

But Adrian Peterson, OU's super freshman tailback, answered with touchdown runs of 40 and 18 yards. (And speaking of touchdown runs, Oregon's never had one against Oklahoma, ever.)

Another Oklahoma win over Oregon was in the history books.

But then for Oklahoma, which has 67 wins since the beginning of the 2000 season - the most in the nation - history never seems to get old.

1958

Oklahoma 6

Oregon 0

1966

Oklahoma 17

Oregon 0

1972

Oklahoma 68

Oregon 3

1975

Oklahoma 62

Oregon 7

2004

Oklahoma 31

Oregon 7

CAPTION(S):

Oklahoma defenders celebrate around tailback Terrence Whitehead during the Sooners' 31-7 win over Oregon in 2004. The Associated Press Barry Switzer coached Oklahoma to a 62-7 trouncing of Oregon in 1975. Bud Wilkinson, a Hall of Famer, led Oklahoma to a narrow 6-0 win in 1958. Oregon lost 68-3 in 1972, Chuck Fairbanks' last year at Oklahoma. Chris Pietsch / The Register-Guard Oregon quarterback Kellen Clemens has the ball knocked loose by Clint Ingram in the first half of last season's loss in Norman, Okla. The Sooners went on to play for the national title.