Sooner Football Recruiting Continues to Soar for 2017

Sooner football recruiting hasn’t been this strong this early since the early days of the Bob Stoops coaching era at Oklahoma.

Like a snowball gaining steam and size as it descends down a mountainside, the 2017 recruiting class at Oklahoma has been getting longer and stronger and has the Sooners right there with the perennial gang of big dogs in the college recruiting game.

I’ve written before about how the Oklahoma football recruiting effort has fallen back the past few seasons. For the better part of Bob Stoops’ first ten years as head coach of the Sooners, which coincided with the first decade of the new millennium, was a regular member of the top-10 club when it came to ranking college recruiting classes.

The past six years, the average team ranking for the Oklahoma recruiting class in football was in the mid teens, according to the Rivals.com recruiting data base.

The six seasons before that (2005-10), the Sooners finished in the top 10 three times, and in the first three seasons following their 2000 national championship season they were among the top-five recruiting classes.

O.K., I hear you. That’s not really that much of a drop off as far as the subjective evaluation of recruiting classes go. After all, being able to consistently pull in top-20 classes is not something to be rebuffed.

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Point taken. But we are talking about Oklahoma football here, and Sooner fans don’t like to be held to middling standards when it comes to college football.

Heading into the start of the 2016 college season, the Sooners are back among elite company in the recruiting wars.

After receiving a verbal commitment last week from four-star linebacker Addison Gumbs out of the Bay area in Northern California, Oklahoma moved past Ohio State into third place in the Rivals.com rolling team rankings for 2017 recruits. The Sooners 2017 recruiting class is also ranked No. 3 thus far by Scout.com.

The commitment by Gumbs brings the Sooners’ total to 19 in its 2017 class. Gumbs chose Oklahoma over scholarship offers from Texas A&M, USC, Washington and several other Pac-12 schools.

Gumbs is the third linebacker commit in the Sooners’ 2017 class, which also currently includes three defensive backs, three offensive line recruits and three wide receivers.