Oklahoma Football: This May Not Be the Best Year for Sooner Draft Prospects
By Chip Rouse
The annual NFL Draft will take place later this month in Chicago. From all indications, it is not going to be the most fruitful of draft years for Oklahoma football prospects.
If you are anything like me, you have grown very tired of all the mock drafts that have come out – as they do every year as soon as the college football season ends and right up until the day the actual process gets underway – pretending to have wisdom on which prospects will be taken by which NFL team and in what order that will occur.
It makes for fun reading and considerable debate, but ultimately means absolutely nothing, other than to set the stage for the actual process to unfold.
Most of us only hear about the top 30 players selected in each year’s draft, which represent the picks made in the first round by every NFL team, and that is because those are the selections that are valued the most and are the players most likely to secure a roster spot on the NFL team that calls out their name on the opening day of the draft.
In reality, however, the annual first-year-player selection process extends through seven rounds of 30 draft picks each, over three days.
The first official NFL Draft was held in 1936. The first and only Oklahoma player taken in that draft year was J.W. Wheeler, a tackle, who was taken in the second round with the 16th overall selection.
It may not surprise you to learn that 15 years went by before a player from Oklahoma was selected in the opening round of the draft. In fairness, though, there were only nine teams that made up what was the National Football League in 1936, and by 1950, the league had grown by just four more teams.
Since 1950, however, the year of Oklahoma’s first national championship in football, the Sooners have had one or more players selected in the opening round of the draft 28 times in 65 years. The overall total of Oklahoma first-round selections is 43, including three who held the distinction of being the No. 1 overall player taken in the draft (Lee Roy Selmon 1976, Billy Sims 1980 and Sam Bradford 2010).
An Oklahoma player was selected in the first round in seven of Bob Stoops’ first eight season as the Sooners head coach, but that has happened just twice since 200 (Bradford in 2010 and offensive tackle Lane Johnson, fourth overall, in 2013).
This year’s draft is likely to be another year in which no Oklahoma prospect is taken among the first 30 draft picks. I have not seen one mock draft that had a Sooner player rated any higher than a third-round selection, and that was wide receiver Sterling Shepard.
NFL analyst Mike Mayock has Shepard rated in a tie with Michael Thomas of Ohio State as the fifth-best wide receiver available in this year’s NFL Draft. Shepard is the only Oklahoma prospect, though, that Mayock has rated as a top-five selection at any position.
That does not mean that Sooner draft prospects like linebackers Eric Striker and Dominique Alexander, defensive end Charles Tapper and defensive back Zack Sanchez won’t be drafted, but rather that they are not likely to go any higher than the middle rounds of the draft, and probably not until the final four rounds, if at all.
If any of those four NFL hopefuls is least likely to have his name called in the draft, I believe it will be Sanchez, who has declared as a junior and is a bit undersized for an NFL cornerback.
ESPN college football analyst Todd McShay echoes Mayock’s opinion on where Shepard is likely to go in the draft later this week. McShay has Shepard going in the third round to the Dallas Cowboys with the 67th overall pick, as an example.
The bottom line is, this may go down as one of the more lean years insofar as Oklahoma prospects taken in the NFL draft.
Only two Sooner players were taken in three successive NFL Draft years from 2000-02, the fewest under head coach Bob Stoops, but in two of those years one of the players was a first-round pick (defensive tackle Stockar McDougle in 2000 and All-American safety Roy Williams in 2002).
There probably won’t be any Sooner names called in the first round of this year’s draft on Thursday, April 28, but the 2016 draft should deliver more than two picks from Oklahoma, but I wouldn’t look for that number being any higher than five at the most.