Vernon Parrington: The First Coach of the Oklahoma Sooners

The third year of the University of Oklahoma's football program was to be the first with the benefit of a full-time football coach. David Ross Boyd decided that the program had grown to the point where a coach was needed and hired Vernon Parrington, a prolific young English Professor, to run the program in addition to being baseball coach and Athletic Director. With all of these extra duties, he was awarded no extra compensation, though he would prove he deserved much.

Vernon Parrington's debut as head coach was both successful and redeeming for the University of Oklahoma. If an Oklahoma Football fan was made to wait until Thanksgiving Day for the season opener nowadays they would need bail money, in 1897 the team played their only two games in November and December. The first being that game on Thanksgiving Day in Norman against the Oklahoma City Town Team that thoroughly embarrassed them in their initial game two years prior. The second was a New Year's Eve battle with Kingfisher College in Guthrie. The Kingfisher College game would play second fiddle to the first ever Territorial College Oratorical Contest.

The opening game of Parrington's tenure wasn't as much a matter of winning a game as it was regaining the respect lost by the 34-0 thrashing in 1895. The difference between this team and that one was this one had the benefit of a well-trained and well-respected head coach. This team was drilled on the practice field....this team had a plan. Over 400 people showed up to the old campus netting the University $73, but the school wanted more of a victory based on pride than dollar signs.

Their pride had been taken along with blood and sweat just a few years before. Vernon Parrington had issued a challenge days before in his University published pamphlet, The Umpire, "...the football team would be glad to receive a challenge from some big eleven who think themselves the center of gravitation. We have a wedge that would go through a brick wall."

Oklahoma City got the ball after winning the toss and promptly marched with the huddled masses of flailing arms and legs over seventy yards to the OU 20 yard line. The spectators sensed a repeat of the massacre of two years before when they suddenly were given hope in the form of a fumble. The University boys rumbled drive after drive, not scoring, but wearing down the Oklahoma City team, who seemed in utter surprise to this organized group of ruffians.

As half neared the University boys finally struck it big, finishing off a drive that saw repetitive, hard, cross-blocking madness ending in a touchdown run to give Oklahoma University a 4-0 lead at the half. The OU locomotive rolled through the second half and finished by posting a 50 point turnaround from the first meeting two years prior, final score, OU-16, Oklahoma City-0. Parrington had instilled these intricate and explosive blocking schemes using what he'd learned at Harvard University years before. He wrote about the success in The Umpire in the days following:

They came from the little town up the way in special coaches, and bearing brand new canes nicely trimmed in crimson and black, and a huge banner and little 'tooters' likewise trimmed in best quality all-silk ribbon. Moreover, they had several new yells they had practiced the entire eighteen miles of the way and which they had learned to give-so it is reported by the trainsmen-in a very sweet ladylike and gentlemanlylike way. But alas! The horns remained untooted and the 'lovely new yells' remained unyelled and the black and crimson banner drooped most dismally on its pole; the day that was so bright at three o'clock was dark and gloomy for them at four. By 'them' of course is meant our friends from Oklahoma City, who came down to see the 'varsity lads taken into camp. They made an imposing appearance as they came onto the campus, one hundred and fifty of them at least led by Col. And Mrs. Wheeler and made up, as we found out that evening at the Wigwam, of royal good fellows and young ladies almost as charming as our own university girls-what more could be said?

Parrington knew his way on the field and with the pen. He was the first ever Oklahoma Football Head Coach to begin his career with a win, but he was far from his last.