Oklahoma football: OU’s 2019 roster reflects nationwide recruiting pull
By Chip Rouse
Every college team wants to be able to attract and sign the best high school players in its state. For Oklahoma football, however, the neighboring Lone Star State offers the richest recruiting harvest anywhere in the country.
The Sooners have been tapping into that hotbed of high school football talent as long as they’ve fielded a football team, which in 2019 reaches 125 years.
As you might suspect, the 2019 Oklahoma football roster is largely made up of players from Oklahoma and Texas, with the latter state winning out by a large margin. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember, and for inquiring minds that goes back over seven decades.
Public records indicate that 38 separate and distinct colleges or universities make their home in the state of Texas, of which 34 belong to one of the six state university systems.
Oklahoma Sooners Football
Given that eye-popping fact, it is incredible how many talented players come out of the state. It seems like an endless supply, which is why you find players from the Lone Star State on the roster of practically every major college program in the nation.
The annual Red River Showdown in Dallas between Oklahoma and Texas is obviously a huge selling card for the Sooners in luring players.
Oklahoma lists 46 players on its 2019 roster from the state of Texas, That represents 40 percent of the Sooners’ 114-man roster. Twenty-six others hail from the Sooner state. By comparison, Texas lists 83 homegrown players, or 60 percent of its 2019 roster.
As fertile as Texas is for recruiting talent, however, nearly 40 percent of the Sooner roster this season hails from somewhere other than Texas or Oklahoma. Beginning in the Bob Stoops era, Oklahoma’s remarkable run of sustained success has made the Sooners a national brand in terms of recruiting reach.
And it continues to pay off for the Crimson and Cream. In his first two seasons as the Oklahoma head coach, Lincoln Riley has brought in consecutive top-10 national recruiting classes.
Eight Sooners on this year’s roster are from California (including TE Grant Calcaterra, RB T.J. Pledger, LB Caleb Kelly and defensive backs Brendan Radley-Hiles and Jordan Parker), and six others are from Florida on the other side of the country. Four OU players are from Ohio and three each out of Louisiana and North Carolina. Sooner junior running back Trey Sermon is from Georgia, as is freshman wide-receiver Jadon Hasselwood, rated by Rivals as the No. 1 WR in the national 2019 class.
In all, the 2019 OU roster includes players from 16 different states and the District of Columbia, plus one each from Canada and the Bahamas.
Oklahoma has long been a national brand in terms of its historical success and rich tradition, and in the 21st century that national recognition is also paying dividends on the national recruiting trail.