''There are many people who don`t know what real pressure is. Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.''

--Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer

It is an autumn Friday afternoon, the day before Oklahoma will hand Missouri a 77-0 loss. Sooners players are milling about the football offices here, jiving with secretaries. Practice has been called off. Barry Switzer, puffing on a huge cigar, leans back in his office chair, standing on third base.

He is asked why, after all these years, he has never been voted the college football Coach of the Year and has been voted the Big Eight Coach of the Year only once, in his first year, 1973. He says it doesn`t matter. But then . . . he has the best winning percentage of any active Division I-A coach, .833 for a 135-25-4 record, and three No. 1 finishes. Only Bear Bryant and Frank Leahy had more.

Maybe it does matter.

''I never even thought about it,'' Switzer says. ''I wondered that myself one day. I was out driving on the road, and they announced the Big Eight Coach of the Year, and I said, `Well, I think I won that one year.` I couldn`t remember. I think it was the first year.''

You do not think of Switzer as coach of the year. In his 14th year, he is taken for granted. He does not wear button-down collars, Ivy League stripes and ties or horn-rimmed glasses, nor does he stalk the sideline with chalk and headset. He is a down-home, fast talker in an Oklahoma baseball jacket, doing what he does best: encouraging players. And putting the best ones on the field. They take that for granted, too.

Three years ago, they stopped taking Switzer for granted. After a 10-0 loss to Missouri in 1983 and facing his third straight loss to Nebraska, he was almost picked off third. Fired. He didn`t flinch. He recruited.

''That pressure never bothers me,'' Switzer said. ''There aren`t many coaches who ever reach retirement age. Something happens to them along the way.''

Something happened to Switzer along the way, something that puts him consistently at the top of his profession. A past that allows him to woo most of the best black talent in the country, to remain carefree and, at age 49, without a gray hair. To consider coaching ''another 10 to 15 years.''

''That type of pressure doesn`t bother me, because whatever happens to me in the future can`t be any worse than the past,'' Switzer said.

-- -- --

''I was in bed and heard a shot. The moment I heard the shot, I knew what she had done. I ran to her and picked her up and carried her to bed.''

Switzer`s mother was dead. That account, along with a complete monologue of the pressures of his childhood, was part of a promotion by former Colorado coach Eddie Crowder. Switzer was one of a handful of college coaches who agreed to take part in the ''Masters of Motivation'' cassette program. To tell his ''secret'' to coaching.

This was his secret.

He grew up in Crossett, Ark., a ''textile, paper products community of 7,000.'' Switzer lived in what he called a ''shotgun house, because you could stand on the front porch and shoot a shotgun through the back porch and not hit a thing.'' They had an outhouse, a ''privy located 50 feet downwind from the house.''

There was no electricity until he was in junior high. He studied by coal lamp and listened to Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights on a battery radio. When he was a freshman at the University of Arkansas, the family finally got a phone.

But Switzer could not use it to make dates. His father, Frank, held several jobs after World War II ended, the most steady being bootlegging. Before his senior year in high school, his father was sent to the state penitentiary, where Switzer would visit on Sundays to tell his father of his Friday night games.

''I was beginning to experience what I consider real pressure,''

Switzer says in the cassettes. ''It also played havoc on my social life, since most of the town wouldn`t let their daughters date the county bootlegger`s son. But Dad didn`t raise a dummy. I was smart enough to handle that one. I had many double dates where my buddy walked to the door for me, but the bad thing about that arrangement was he got to walk her back.''

In August, 1959, just before his senior year at Arkansas, Switzer`s ill and despondent mother committed suicide. Just more than a decade later, his father was killed in an automobile accident, ''something he and I had discussed and feared might happen and did.'' Switzer said he was murdered.

''I know who did it,'' he said. ''They died with him in the car trying to rush him to the hospital. It was a woman who shot him. She caught him with another woman, wrecked the car and killed both of them.''

Switzer`s reputation is of being a recruiter but not a particularly good coach. And critics have asked, How can you lose with all that talent?

You can`t. And that`s why, he says, recruiting is coaching. The most important part.

''Doesn`t that count for something?'' Switzer said, laughing. ''Isn`t that important? They don`t just fall out of the sky.

''There are hundreds of coaches out there who know how to coach, coach the same way. There are no secrets in the game. Things that coaches do differently is their personality, their communication, their rapport with players. That separates them some. But as far as knowledge of the game, there`s hundreds of them out there, no better and no worse.''

Switzer`s chalkboard is his bright but piercing eyes. His warm smile. The stories. And, of course, the background.

''It has given me tremendous drive,'' Switzer said. ''Made me highly motivated, made me a very sensitive, emotional individual. I think that quality helps me relate to mothers, fathers and kids. They appreciate the quality of a person. Most of the time people like to put you on a pedestal, and when you can come in and relate to them and make them feel that you are just like them, you`re common folk.''

He paused, perhaps thinking back on all the great ones. Joe Washington. Billy Sims, Lucious and Lee Roy Selmon, David Overstreet. Thomas Lott. With the exception of Tony Casillas and now Brian Bosworth, all of the best have one common thread: black skin.

''I`m probably closest to black kids,'' Switzer said. ''White kids have mothers and fathers. Basically, black kids have been closer to me. They just know that they trust me.''

The bond exists because many have walked down that same backwoods, low-income path. There have been problems at home. Sims and Casillas, among others, tried to quit. But after they hear Switzer`s story, they want to stay and fight.