Oklahoma football: Top 10 Sooner first-round NFL Draft picks
By Chip Rouse
Of the 382 Oklahoma football players who have been selected in the 82-year history of the NFL Draft, 42 have been taken in the opening round.
On Thursday night, the National Football League will hold its 83rd annual player draft, and the Sooners are all but guaranteed of having one more name added to the list of first-round selections.
Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Baker Mayfield, who walked on at two major college programs, including Oklahoma, appears to be a lock to become the Sooners’ 43rd first-round pick. In fact, the general consensus is that Mayfield will go among the first 10 picks in this year’s NFL Draft.
If you ask Mayfield, though, the competitor and eternal optimist that he is, he won’t hesitate to inform you “he won’t go any later than” the fifth pick (which belongs to John Elway and the Denver Broncos, by the way) in the draft. That was his response to writer Robert Klemko for a cover story in the April 23 issue of Sports Illustrated.
Mayfield’s rise to stardom has been a curious one, but his accomplishments on the gridiron have been anything but. in his three seasons as the starting quarterback at Oklahoma, Mayfield set an FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) record for consecutive games with at least two touchdown passes in a single game (27), a Big 12 record for yards per pass attempt and touchdowns responsible for (153), and he ranks second in league history in passing TDs, passing efficiency rating and total offense.
Coming out of high school in Austin, Texas, Mayfield received only two scholarship offers: Florida Atlantic and Washington State (where former Texas Tech head coach and former OU offensive coordinator Mike Leach is).
Baker’s father influenced him to walk on at a program that was more to his liking and closer to home. Although growing up as an Oklahoma football fan, despite residing in the heart of Texas Longhorn country, he elected to walk on at Texas Tech.
Mayfield earned the starting QB assignment as a freshman at Texas Tech in 2013. He started the first five games before getting hurt. The injury forced Mayfield to miss the next four games, and it was never the same for him at Texas Tech after that. The rest is history. Texas Tech’s loss was Oklahoma’s gain.
Mayfield enrolled at Oklahoma for the second semester in 2013. He elected to walk-on at OU, sat out the 2014 season because of NCAA and Big 12 transfer rules, and then beat out Trevor Knight for the starting job at Oklahoma in the 2015 season.
There have been a number of first-round draft picks from Oklahoma who have made it big in the NFL, and even more that have experienced not much more than a cup of coffee at the next level. It is even accurate to say that the largest percentage of former Oklahoma Sooners who found success in the NFL were drafted later than the first round, and some found their way to the NFL as free agents and weren’t drafted at all.
We thought it would be fun to rank the top-10 first-round NFL Draft selections from Oklahoma, based entirely on how successful they were in their NFL careers.
The first NFL Draft was held in 1936, but there was not a player from OU selected in the opening round until 1950 (halfback George Thomas was taken in the first round by the Washington Redskins with the sixth overall pick in the 1950 NFL Draft). We used 1950 as the starting point for this analysis.