Owen belongs on OU mountain
We kicked off our Bob Stoops-at-10 series today, and I wrote about Stoops’ place in OU history. For the visual element, artist Steve Boaldin drew a Mount Rushmore edition of Sooner coaches.
The only discussion we had: Should Bennie Owen join Stoops, Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer on the list? The answer was, absolutely.
Brent Clark is an OU football historian. He wrote the Sooner Century book and a Joe Don Looney biography. Ask Clark who the greatest coach in OU history is, and he’ll answer Bennie Owen. Every time.
Owen coached in the days before national championships — at least before the AP poll brought the most elementary legitimacy to the process — but truth is, none of Owen’s OU teams were national-title caliber. Most were very good and some were great, but they weren’t Army/Navy/Ivy League/Notre Dame/Big Ten status.
Owen was great for another reason. He made football important at OU. When Owen became coach at OU in 1905, football had been played 10 years on campus, and the students loved it. But under Owen, OU football became a public entity. Not the statewide institution that Wilkinson made the Sooners in the late 1940s, but Owen made OU football appealing to fans in Norman and Oklahoma City and the surrounding areas.
Owen formed an athletic department, and he started the drive for a new stadium, which finally opened in 1925, his next-to-last year as coach, and remains the foundation for what is now the glittering coliseum on Jenkins Avenue. Sooners for almost 100 years have played on Owen Field, and the real estate is most adequately named.
Owen could coach a little, too. He pioneered the forward pass in this part of the country, he fostered rivalries with Oklahoma A&M and Texas, he won 122 games, which allows OU to lay claim, as soon as Stoops gets his third win this season, as America’s only school with four 100-win coaches.
Owen gave OU football a tradition from which to launch the glory that was to come.
In 2003, I interviewed Dale Arbuckle, who that year turned 100 and had played for Owen in the 1920s. Here’s what he said about Owen: “He was very quiet. Very thought-provoking, as well as systematic. Was not as critical as coaches usually are. He was more like your father.”
In some ways, Owen was like a father to every Sooner fan. The father of OU football.
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