Oklahoma football: Modern recruiting requires patience

Oklahoma football continues to show that patience can be a powerful weapon in the hyper-competitive world of recruiting.

The state’s top 2020 recruit Andrew Raym first committed to Oklahoma football back in November of 2017 before backing off his original commitment in May of the following year.

Raym – the No. 3 offensive line prospect in the 2020 class – spent the next 13 months being wooed by the top schools in the country. Michigan and Georgia came particularly hard after the state of Oklahoma’s No. 1-ranked prospect in the class of 2020, but Oklahoma football head coach Lincoln Riley and offensive line coach Bill Bedenbaugh never gave up on the Broken Arrow prospect.

It represents two major shifts in the Sooners’ recruiting philosophy from the Bob Stoops era.

First, Oklahoma will take an early commitment from a player before he’s done visiting other schools. Second, it shows a continued commitment to recruiting kids even after they have backed out.

Raym grew up an Oklahoma fan. As an in-state product he always dreamed of playing for the Sooners and when he impressed Bedenbaugh enough as a sophomore, the Sooners pulled the trigger and made an offer. During the Stoops era – more accurately before the arrival of Lincoln Riley – Oklahoma would have advised Raym to wait before until he was 100 percent sure before announcing a commitment. The thought being that once he does, the Sooners want to be done recruiting that spot.

It makes sense from a certain point of view. Verbal pledges are simply that – an oral agreement between two parties that a scholarship will be offered and received once one of the two national signing days roll around.

There’s a level of trust that goes into this for both sides. Should a commit back out at the last minute, the school will have missed out on an opportunity to fill their need with another player. This is why Oklahoma’s classes tended to fill up later, often going into a player’s senior season.

Still, that’s not the approach Riley takes. The Sooners now except commitments as soon as they make an offer, especially on players of Raym’s caliber. The idea is that even if a player does change his mind at some point during the long and winding road from a sophomore year commitment to a senior year singing, the Sooners remain his default school.

It’s not that verbal commitments don’t mean anything – clearly they are still the biggest indicator of where a player will end up. According to a study 87.6 percent of verbal pledges end up signing a national letter of intent with said school. The Sooners are just giving players more wiggle room in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast-paced world of modern recruiting. For a small-town kid like Raym, once offers started coming in from national powerhouses it was hard to turn down a free trip to visit Athens or Ann Arbor and eventually he wanted to enjoy these visits unencumbered by a commitment.

The same happened with some other high-profile Oklahoma football commits. Both CeeDee Lamb and Theo Wease were pledged to the Sooners early, backed out and eventually came back into the fold to sign. The Sooners recently lost a commitment from four-star cornerback Dontae Manning, but are clearly still a player in his future.

Patience and persistence  are both virtues that seem to be on the decline in today’s society, but the Sooners continue to prove just how valuable they can be.