Oklahoma football: Sooners future QB situation best of the rest
By Chip Rouse
Spoiler alert for all of college football: No team has a brighter picture at quarterback looking out the next three years than the Oklahoma football program.
While most college teams are always looking for the next great prospect to play quarterback, the Sooners seem to be stockpiling them.
When you produce three Heisman finalists and two Heisman winners in the past four years — along with a head coach considered to be one of the best and most creative offensive minds and a proven record of developing the quarterback position and producing championship-level teams — it puts you in a prime position to recruit the best available talent at the quarterback spot.
Baker Mayfield…Kyler Murray…Jalen Hurts — all highly recognizable names to college football fans everywhere and all outstanding quarterbacks who played for Riley at Oklahoma, None of the three, however, began their college career as a Sooner.
Not one of the three started his career at Oklahoma. Mayfield and Murray elected to transfer to OU following their freshman seasons at Texas Tech and Texas A&M, respectively. And Hurts ended up in Norman working under Riley as a graduate transfer after three years at Alabama and being relegated to backup duty behind Tua Tagovailoa.
The aforementioned quarterback trio may not have come to OU through the normal recruiting channel, but because of what they were able to achieve individually and collectively at Oklahoma under Riley that enabled OU to draw the strong attention of and land Spencer Rattler, the No. 1 quarterback recruit in the 2019 class, and Caleb Williams, the top quarterback prospect nationally in OU’s incoming 2021 class.
Before Williams became the top QB target in the Sooners’ 2021 class, Brock Vandagriff, another five-star, highly recruited QB prospected, had verbally committed to Oklahoma. Vandagriff decommitted from the Sooners in January 2020, however, and eventually signed at Georgia.
Around this time every year, the college football staff at ESPN produces a future college football power index that looks ahead the next three seasons (2021, 2022 and 2023) and ranks the top 25 teams at the quarterback position, on offense, defense, and overall team strength.
The first installment of the ESPN 2021 future power rankings, assessing the quarterback position, is now out. You have to be a subscriber to ESPN+ to have access to the complete article, but I will summarize it for you.
Perhaps you’ve surmised by now that Oklahoma is No. 1 in the quarterback category projecting out through the 2023 season. The Sooners head a top five that includes Clemson at No. 2, USC, Alabama and Ohio State.
“After a two-year gap, Oklahoma returns to the top of the quarterback rankings,” writes ESPN staff writer Adam Rittenberg.
Rattler is well on his way to living up to the high expectations Oklahoma had when it recruited the Phoenix, Arizona, high school standout. As a redshirt freshman this past season, the First-Team All-Big 12 selection passed for 3,031 yards and 28 touchdowns and finished with the 11th best passer rating nationally (172.6).
“The Sooners are set up well behind (Rattler) after signing Caleb Williams, ESPN’s top-rated dual-threat quarterback and No. 16 overall player in the 2021 recruiting class,” Rittenberg continued. “OU also added Micah Bowens, an ESPN Top 300 quarterback from 2020.”
Oklahoma was No. 5 a year ago in the ESPN quarterback future power ranking and No. 2 in 2019.
A year ago, in an article covering the same subject, Rittenberg wrote, “As long as Riley is in Norman, the Sooners will be among the best in the nation at quarterback.
“The trend lines there are impossible to ignore, especially when projecting the quarterback outlook.”
”