Oklahoma football: Lincoln Riley sealed the deal, Sooners’ top 2021 recruit says

Five-star quarterbacks are a red-hot commodity in college recruiting wars and Oklahoma football landed the best signal-caller in the 2021 class on Saturday.

And this wasn’t a first for Lincoln Riley and the Sooners. It was just two cycles ago that Oklahoma reeled in the No. 1 quarterback in the 2019 class in Spencer Rattler. Two out of three is pretty darn good and is one of the reasons the Sooners have become known as the new “Quarterback U” of college football.

And then there is the supporting fact that four Oklahoma quarterbacks have won the Heisman Trophy in the past 16 seasons and two others have finished as the runner-up in the Heisman voting.

Caleb Williams, out of Gonzaga High School in Washington, D.C., was on the target list of practically every major college program in the country. The top-ranked dual-threat quarterback and No. 3 player overall in the 2021 class, ended all the suspense on Saturday when he verbally committed to the Sooners.

Oklahoma previously had a commitment from Brock Vandagriff, the No. 1 pro-style quarterback in the 2021 class. Vandagriff committed to the Sooners in June of last year, but decided to stay closer to home and decommitted from OU the first of this year. He is now committed to Georgia, a mere 11 miles from his hometown in Bogart, Georgia. That opened the door for Riley to go after Williams.

All’s well that ends well, as they say, and the truth is, Williams is a much better fit in what Oklahoma likes to do on offense than Vandagriff would have been.

There are probably several reasons why Williams picked Oklahoma over the two other schools that were on his short list (LSU and Maryland), but the one he emphasized in an interview with Adam Friedman, a recruiting analyst with Rivals.com, was his connection with Lincoln Riley.

"“He (Riley) kind of ended it all,” Williams said. “He was kind of a finishing touch to me committing in there. I think it was really our connection. When I went there and we were in the war room, the offensive meeting room, for like two hours and it didn’t even seem like two hours.”"

Williams told Friedman that he has been working on some other highly rated 2021 recruits, trying to get them to come and be with him at Oklahoma. He specifically named four-star wide receiver Jalil Farooq, No. 1 wide receiver Emeka Egbuka and four-star offensive lineman Tristan Leigh. Williams says he’s also been talking to four-star, in-state defensive back Kendal Daniels, from the Tulsa area, and “a few defensive guys.”

Riley obviously worked his magic on Williams, now let’s hope the highly touted QB prospect can do the same with some of the other big names he has been conversing with.