Barring some kind of major meltdown Oklahoma football will bring in its third-straight top-10 recruiting class once things are official on signing day 2019.
According to Rivals.com it’s a feat that hasn’t happened in Norman since 2004-07.
Those classes combined to form the 2008 Oklahoma team that many consider to be the best offense in the history of college football. The Sooners finished that season just a DeMarco Murray injury and/or a couple of play-action pass calls on the goal line away from a national championship (but that’s another story for another time).
The Sooners fell off in recruiting after 2007, signing only one top 10 class over the next eight years. That’s not to say there wasn’t success during that period. There were three more Big 12 titles and six more 10-win seasons, but after a disastrous finish to the 2014 season by Oklahoma standards, there was little denying that things needed to change going into the 2015 season.
You may be saying to yourself: recruiting is just a bunch of talking heads who know nothing about the game. Or the go-to for Sooner fans on message boards and Facebook pages:” Sam Bradford and Baker Mayfield were three stars and Rhett Bomar was a five-star. What do those guys know about talent?”
While recruiting rankings aren’t a guarantee for individual success (there are plenty of anecdotal misses along the way), there’s no denying the correlation between highly-ranked classes and national success. According to Saturdaydownsouth 12 of the last 15 national champions have averaged top 10 recruiting classes in the four years prior to winning the title.
These numbers don’t lie and it’s something that Oklahoma coaches took notice of going into the 2015 season. The Sooners revamped on several levels and those changes are starting to pay off.
Recruiting is on an uptick and for a while earlier this summer Oklahoma had the No. 1 class in the entire country.
Oklahoma is tied for the national lead in five-star commits with three and leads the country in number of commits in the Rivals 100 with six. While many of the classes above Oklahoma are quickly filling up, the Sooners still have eight openings and are on the list of finalists for several more Rivals 100 and Rivals 250 players. That gives the Oklahoma the upward mobility to make this the first top five class in over a decade.
So what were the factors in Oklahoma’s latest recruiting surge? One can’t point to just one thing, but a perfect storm of ingredients that put the Sooners back among the elite players in national recruiting.