What Has Happened with Sooner Football Recruiting?

It is still six months away from when everything becomes final as far as locking in the 2016 recruiting classes, but shouldn’t we be a little concerned seeing Sooner football recruiting down in the 60s in the current team rankings?

Both Rivals.com and Scout.com have the Sooners well down the list in the latest rankings of the college football recruiting classes for 2016. In fact, the Scout.com team rankings have Oklahoma at No. 65, behind the Kansas Jayhawks and six other Big 12 schools. If that’s not cause for concern, I don’t know what is.

The Sooners list six verbal commitments thus far in their 2016 recruiting class. The highest rated of the six is four-star quarterback prospect Austin Kendall out of North Carolina. OU’s five other commitments at this time include two wide receivers, two defensive players and an offensive lineman.

Dec 6, 2014; Norman, OK, USA; The Oklahoma Sooners take the field prior to action against the Oklahoma State Cowboys at Gaylord Family – Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Mark D. Smith-USA TODAY Sports

By comparison, TCU and Baylor, the two preseason favorites in the 2015 conference race have 15 and 13 commitments, respectively, at this early stage and both programs rank in the top 25 in two of the three major recruiting rankings Scout.com and ESPN.com. Rivals.com has TCU at No. 30 currently, and Baylor just a few notches higher at No. 27.

The last several years, the Sooners have brought in top-15 recruiting classes, and in the early and mid-2000s, OU was regularly were in the top-10 in recruiting virtually every season.

To be fair, Oklahoma under Bob Stoops has never really been one of the early strong performers when it come to ranking recruiting classes at this still relatively early stage of the process. The Sooners have typically come on strong at the later stages in securing their final place in the national rankings.

But it frankly is disconcerting to see Stoops & Co. this far back of the other schools in its own conference in terms of the verbal commitments and top prospects OU has a month out from the kickoff of the 2015 season. TCU, for example, already has eight commitments from four-star prospects, according to Scout.com.

OU’s four-star commit, Kendall, is rated as the 117th best prospect in the ESPN 300 for 2016. He is the only one of the six Sooner commitments ranked in the ESPN 300. Meanwhile, five of the TCU commitments and five of the Baylor commitments fall in the ESPN 300, with two each in the Top 200.

To add insult to injury, reigning national champion Ohio State has five players listed among the top 50 in the ESPN 100 and Alabama has six commitments that fall into that category.

Clearly the Sooners have some work to do in recruiting their 2016 football class. Let’s hope it starts a little sooner in the process this time around.