The No. 10 is more than a jersey number for Oklahoma football wide receiver Theo Wease.
It represents the impact the Sooner coaching staff expects to see from the former five-star wide receiver from Allen, Texas, in his sophomore season. Wease attended the the same high school as Heisman-winning OU quarterback Kyler Murray.
Wease was one of four members of Oklahoma’s top-10-ranked 2019 recruiting class who were rated as five-star prospects. Rivals rated the 6-foot, 3-inch, 205-pound wide receiver as the third best wide receiver and No. 11 overall in the 2019 class. Another member of that same 2019 Sooner class was the No. 1 wide-receiver prospect in the country in Jadon Hasselwood, out of Ellenwood, Georgia.
A third high-school All-American in that 2019 class who became an Oklahoma teammate of both Wease and Hasselwood was Trejan Bridges, rated as the fourth best wide-receiver prospect in the country.
With that five-star trio, added to an OU wide-receiver corps that included CeeDee Lamb, Charleston Rambo, Nick Basquine and Lee Morris, another product of Allen High School, the Sooners appeared stacked with talent and depth at the position for the immediate future.
Wease saw action in 13 of the Sooners’ 14 games last season, but for only limited minutes because of the depth of the receiving talent available for Lincoln Riley’s offense. He caught eight passes on the season for 136 yards and two touchdowns.
This will be the season we hear from Oklahoma receiver Theo Wease.
He was on the receiving end of a 37-yard touchdown catch in his very first collegiate game, a 70-14 Oklahoma win over South Dakota. He also caught a TD pass in the Sooners remarkable 34-31 comeback win over Baylor later in the season and had a 21-yard reception in OU’s College Football Playoff loss to LSU.
There are several reasons that point toward Wease having a breakout sophomore season. The first is that the talented receiver has a year of experience under his belt in Riley’s Air Raid offense. It’s also time for Wease to move up on the depth chart, which will be made easier by the departure of the All-American Lamb, as well as Basquine and Morris.
A third, and perhaps more telling factor, is that both of his teammates from the 2019 class, Hasselwood and Bridges are going to miss at least the first half of the season. Hasselwood suffered an ACL injury in working out on his own in the offseason, and Bridges is expected to miss five more games with a suspension for an NCAA rules violation that began with the LSU game. Defensive end Ronnie Perkins and running back Rhamondre Stevenson were affected by the same suspension.
That opens the door for Wease to step up and show what he is made of and live up to the expectations the Sooner coaches had when they recruited him.
Wease told staff writer Tyler Palmateer of the Norman Transcript this spring, “When you’re playing behind the best player in the country (referring to All-American CeeDee Lamb), there’s no rush. Your time will always come.”
It would appear that time is now.