Oklahoma football: Sooners’ 2020 recruiting class addresses critical needs
By Chip Rouse
The February 2020 signing day for Oklahoma football recruiting was anticlimactic compared with the early national signing day a couple of months earlier.
Last week’s recruiting news, however, served as the final touches to another highly successful recruiting cycle for head coach Lincoln Riley and his Sooner staff.
The Sooners’ 2020 class is Riley’s third complete class as head coach. He was also actively engaged in the 2016 and ’17 recruiting classes under Bob Stoops.
Oklahoma signed two players on National Signing Day on Feb. 5, but that was because, like most major college programs, the Sooners had received national letters of intent from 20 players during the early signing day in December and then added four-star quarterback prospect Chandler Morris on Jan. 2.
OU added a pair of four-star defenders, defensive end Reggie Grimes and defensive back Joshua Eaton earlier this month to round out consensus No. 11 recruiting class. ESPN ranked the Sooners 2020 class at No. 9, which marks the fourth year in a row that at least one of the major national recruiting services has rated Oklahoma as among the nation’s top-10 classes.
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Grimes and Eaton are two of 11 defensive players signed by Oklahoma as defensive coordinator Alex Grinch and the Sooners continue serious efforts to strengthen and improve OU’s performance on the defensive side of the ball.
Defense is Oklahoma’s most pressing need for improvement. Although the Sooner defense last season made huge leaps of improvement statistically, it still has a long way to go to be at the level of the nation’s elite teams and good enough for Oklahoma to survive beyond the semifinal round in the College Football Playoff. The Sooners have seen that movie far too often the last three seasons, and the ending never changes.
The defensive players in OU’s 2020 recruiting class are evenly distributed between the defensive line and the secondary. The breakdown is five defensive backs, four defensive linemen (including two defensive ends) to go along with a pair of linebackers.
The Sooners returns a handful of defensive backs with starting experience, but size has been an issue in the secondary that Grinch wants to address. The average height of the returning defensive backs is 5 feet, 11 inches. The five DBs among the 2020 recruits average 6-feet, 1 inch.
One of the most proven defensive players in the 2020 class is nose guard Perion Winfrey, a junior college transfer who was rated as the No. 1 JUCO recruit in the nation.
Winfrey is one of eight recruits who are already enrolled and on campus, which means he and the other early enrollees will go through spring practice, which begins shortly, and get a head start on getting adjusted and learning the system.
Along with Winfrey, defensive backs D.J. Graham and Bryson Washington and linebacker Shane Whitter are already on campus.
An important and often overlooked element in Oklahoma’s explosive offensive production the last five seasons has been the play of the offensive line. Throughout that period OU has had outstanding performance out of the O-line, and head coach Riley and offensive line coach Bill Bedenbaugh have made a special effort to keep the pipeline flowing, always looking to the future.
The Sooners’ 23-member 2020 recruiting class includes five offensive lineman, two of which — Noah Nelson and Andrew Raym — are already enrolled. Raym, a four-star prospect from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, was rated by Rivals as the No. 7 guard in the nation at his position.
Four-star wide-receiver Marvin Mims and running back Seth McGowan are also on campus and will take part in spring practice. McGowan, from Mesquite, Texas, was rated the 13th best running back in the country out of high school.
Joining Mims among the incoming recruits at wide receiver are a pair out of the transfer portal: Theo Howard from UCLA and Obi Obialo from Marshall. Obialo actually played his freshman season at Oklahoma State.
Howard suffered an Achilles injury during winter workouts and will miss spring practice. Time will tell what impact the injury will have on his effectiveness in the 2020 season.
All in all, another solid recruiting effort by Riley and his assistant coaches, and Sooner fans are hoping for more great things from this group, if not this season in the years to come.