Oklahoma football: Five Sooners featured in ESPN’s Top-100 Players
By Chip Rouse
Who would you list as the best Oklahoma football players to watch during the 2021 season, which will kick off for the Sooners 11 days from now.?
Taking into account the entire college football landscape, how many of those Sooner players would fall into this season’s top 100?
A team of experts assembled by ESPN has done the work for you and me, or at least come up with a straw man for us take biased shots at.
Every year, just ahead of the new season, ESPN and other media outlets go through the exercise of evaluating and ranking the top 50, and sometimes up to 100, players in college and professional football.
ESPN.com on Monday posted its 2021 version of college football’s Top 100 Players for 2021. I’ll save you the trouble of scanning through all 100 names and tell you that five Oklahoma Sooners made the list. I’ll also tell you that there should have been several more.
Sooner fans will like hearing that the top-ranked player going into the 2021 season, according to the ESPN expert panel, is Spencer Rattler, Oklahoma’s next Heisman Trophy contender on a growing list of Heisman winning OU quarterback.
His Sooner teammate, sophomore wide receiver Marvin Mims, is No. 8 in ESPN’s Top 100 ranking, giving Oklahoma two players in the top 10. That matches Alabama, which also had two players ranked in the top 10.
The three other Sooners ranked among the top 100 players to watch this season are No. 37, LB Nik Bonitto; No. 64, RB Kennedy Brooks; and No. 99, DL Isaiah Thomas.
All five Oklahoma players are certainly worthy of a top-100 ranking. but I believe at least three other Sooners are obvious by their omission.
The three that come immediately to mind are WR Theo Wease, TE Austin Stogner and DL Perrion Winfrey.
Wease was the second leading OU receiver in an offense that ranked 11th in the country a year ago and No. 14 in passing offense. Stogner was Rattler’s leading target and No. 1 on the team in receptions before he suffered a leg injury late in the 2020 season.
Like Thomas, Winfrey is on the 2021 preseason watch list for the Bednarik Award and the Nagurski Trophy, both of which honor the best defensive player in college football, and both are also on the Preseason All-Big 12 Team.
Candidly, if 10 Alabama players are on the top-100 list — almost twice as many as any other school — it seems reasonable to assume at least a couple of other OU players are worthy of consideration.
After all, Oklahoma will soon be a member of the SEC, which in itself should be worth a few more ESPN votes, if you get my drift.