Did Bedlam Once Decide OU Or OSU Colors On Oklahoma License Plates?

Oklahoma has a new-ish license plate, and it's about as Oklahoma as you can get. It's red, it pays tribute to the original 46-star state flag, and it replaced that scissortail "Twitter" plate that people loved to hate.

Why are we talking about license plates? Well, when they were assigning me to the spectrum, I didn't get trains... I got old gasoline signs and license plates as an obsessive interest. So here we are. This is gonna be fun.

I've always thought Oklahoma has had some pretty good license plates over the years. Personally, I loved the Sacred Rain Arrow plate we had in the early 2010s, but there's something about those even older embossed metal tags that you just don't get with the newer designs. The graphics were simple, the lettering was stamped right into the metal, and some of those older plates had a retro look that'll never be out of style.

The plates from the '90s were about as simple as you could get. White background, green lettering, and that little "Oklahoma Is OK" slogan. They weren't fancy. They didn't try to be trendy. They just worked. But there's another part of Oklahoma's license plate history that I find even more interesting, especially now that we're into football season.

Oklahoma's OU And OSU License Plate History

There was a time when the state alternated between OU Sooner crimson and cream, and Oklahoma State Cowboy orange and black for the plate designs... And depending on who you ask, the color plate the state issued that year had everything to do with who won the last Bedlam game...

That's the story, anyway. I couldn't actually find any solid proof of that rumor. Realistically, they probably swapped back and forth depending on which color of paint was cheaper for the prison system to buy.

According to the state's own history of Oklahoma license plates, the color switching started in 1967. The first plate featured OU's red and white. A white plate with crimson red letters and numbers. But the switch to a bright OSU orange plate with black letters a few years later... but it only lasted that one year, 1968.

If anything, the complaints against the orange and black plate only showed how tasteless Oklahoma life was back then. By 69, it was back to crimson and cream.

Even so, that college ball trend didn't last either. In 1970, the legislature changed the law to forever ban using OU or OSU school colors on license plates.

Today, you can have your college-specific plate if you want to, and the rules have changed in your favor on this. Instead of carrying two license plates and registrations as you used to with a "vanity" plate, you can just opt for the single specialty plate to be your only plate now.

Still, it's a fun little piece of Oklahoma history that I'm quite positive that if I didn't know, which I didn't, you didn't know either... But now we do, twin.

All the same, it would be fun to force Sooner fans to drive around with my Cowboys colors on their car. Funnier than the other way around. In a state where college football loyalties can run deep enough to divide a family, that probably didn't go over equally well in every driveway.