Legendary Sooners defender Dewey Selmon, the most decorated player in team history, joins his little portal

Legendary Sooners defender Dewey Selmon, the most decorated player in team history, joins his little portal.

Dewey Selmon was selected to the 2024 College Football Hall of Fame Class by the National Football Foundation (NFF) and the College Hall of Fame on Monday. Dewey Selmon was a member of the renowned and feared Selmon Brothers defensive line trio for Oklahoma’s renowned defenses of the early and mid-1970s.

Selmon will join the ranks of Oklahoma’s twenty-fourth former player (defensive backs Roy Williams, 2022, and Rickey Dixon, 2019; linebackers Brian Bosworth, 2015, and Rod Shoate, 2013) and their fifth consecutive defender in the College Hall of Fame. On December 10 in Las Vegas, at the 66th NFF Annual Awards Dinner, he will be inducted along with 19 other former players and three former coaches as part of the 2024 class. A national ballot comprising 78 players and 9 coaches from the Football Bowl Subdivision and 101 players and 32 coaches from the divisional ranks was used to select this year’s group.

For the Sooners, Selmon was a standout at nose guard and defensive tackle. Over his four years on campus, OU amassed a 43-2-1 record (the nation’s best winning percentage at.946), won four consecutive Big Eight titles, and won national titles in 1974 and 1975 during his junior and senior seasons. He was selected as a consensus All-American in 1975 after earning first-team All-America recognition in 1974.

As a longtime resident of Norman, Selmon is originally from Eufaula, Oklahoma. During his time at OU, he recorded 325 tackles, 25 tackles for loss (for 109 yards), three forced fumbles, and two fumble recoveries. He recorded 22 tackles in a 16–13 victory over Texas in 1974, which is still the school record for the most by a defensive lineman in a single game.

In the 14-6 Orange Bowl victory over Michigan that secured the national championship for the Sooners, he also holds the record for the most tackles by a defensive lineman at OU (13). Only five defensive linemen from OU have recorded 100 or more tackles in a single season twice, with Selmon having done so twice (1974 and 1975).

From 1973 to 1975, when Selmon started, OU had a 32-1-1 record. Only 12.1 points were given up per game by the Sooners in 1973, 8.4 in 1974, and 12.8 in 1975. By the end of his career, he had the second-most starts of any OU defensive lineman with 34.

Selmon’s Oklahoma teams placed among the top three in the AP rankings every year; they were ranked No. 2 in 1972, No. 3 in 1973, and No. 1 in 1974 and 1975. Throughout his career, the Sooners were ranked in the AP Top 5 48 times out of 60 weeks (13 weeks at No. 1 and 19 weeks at No. 2).

Tampa Bay chose Selmon in the second round of the 1976 NFL Draft. He played for the Buccaneers and San Diego Chargers for seven years in the NFL before returning to Oklahoma to work as an oil and gas consultant and eventually starting his own construction company.

Dewey Selmon
Dewey Selmon

Nathan J. Fish/USA TODAY NETWORK-The Oklahoman

His younger brother, Lee Roy Selmon, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1988 before he was, and he was inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Orange Bowl Hall of Fame in 2022. Like Dewey and Lee Roy, the older brother Lucious Selmon was an All-American defensive lineman at OU. All three played for the Sooners in 1972 and 1973, and they all started for the ’73 team. In 2022, a statue outside Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium was dedicated in their honor.

Selmon has dedicated his life to serving the youth, both domestically and internationally. His children, who founded the Shine Foundation, an organization that helps people all over the world, are the inheritors of this tradition. Since 2005, Selmon has been a member of the Shine Foundation Board of Directors. In addition, he has traveled on multiple occasions to construct a school for the orphanage that houses hundreds of children who have been abandoned by their parents due to protracted hostilities in that region of the world. This organization works with conflict-torn regions of West Africa.