A victory lap for our voice of the Sooners
Mike’s Blog
Somewhere in my closet is a box of cassette tapes which contain OU football radio broadcast recordings of those amazing early years of Oklahoma’s wishbone offense. It was very important for me — at age 12 and 13 — to make sure I hit the red record button at precisely the right moment when the Oklahoma Football Radio Network hit the air each Saturday.
The voice on those recordings and the voice that brought Sooner football to most of Oklahoma — long before anyone envisioned an ESPN or Fox Sports or other television that assured the Sooners would be on the tube every weekend — was Bob Barry, then sports anchor of WKY-TV and the man Bud Wilkinson hand-selected in 1961 to do the Sooner radio play-by-play.
Week One: Oklahoma vs. Utah State Aggies
Cancel your plans for the next three months, folks. Oklahoma football starts Saturday at 6 pm at Owen Field.
That’s when the Sooners are expected to win their 800th game in school history. The only schools in the 800-win club are Michigan (877), Texas (845) Notre Dame (837), Nebraska (827), Ohio State (819) and Penn State (811).
The poor victim of this landmark achievement will be the Aggies of Utah State, which is a Western Athletic Conference team that may soon be a Mountain West team, as if that really matters. The Utah State team has been in three different conferences since 1978 (Big West, Sun Belt and WAC) and a few years as an independent.
The Aggies are better than in past years, with some of their faithful actually talking about going bowling this year. But still, they should be no match for No. 8 Oklahoma in Norman.