Oklahoma football: Sooner’s 2023 recruiting class gaining elite flavor while on historic roll

Oklahoma football head coach Brent Venables emphasized the value of patience in the course of targeting and earning commitments for what would be his first full-fledged Sooner recruiting class.

Venables had an important hand in securing, adding to and ultimately closing out OU’s top-10 ranked 2022 class, but that was more of a sprint with Venables being named the new Sooner head coach just days ahead of the first national signing day for the ’22 class.

Former OU head coach Bob Stoops actually did the lion’s share of the work in the interim time between Lincoln Riley’s departure and the naming of the new head coach and also worked with Venables in the critical time during the opening month of his arrival in Norman.

While closing out the 2022 class, which will make its college debut this season, Venables and his reworked Oklahoma coaching staff were also looking to the 2023 recruiting cycle.

Venables may be new as a head coach, but this is definitely not his first recruiting rodeo. All you have to do is look at the high-quality defensive players he brought in at Clemson to see his approach works.

Unlike many coaches at other major programs, Venables prefers to play the long game when it comes to recruiting at the highest college level. He wants players who are truly committed, not recruits who may be temporarily committed until they might find somewhere else to go.

As Yahoo Sports staff writer John Williams described in a July article, “He (Venables) wants players to take their visits. He wants them to explore all of their options before they commit. He wants the players that commit to the University of Oklahoma to understand the true meaning of the word. Because when a player commits, Oklahoma is committing in turn.”

That philosophy is all well and good, but when at the end of May this year, the Sooners had just three verbal commitments and just five before June 15 for a recruiting class buried in the 40s in the national team class rankings, Oklahoma fans, who are passionate about their football, began expressing major concern.

What’s that time-worn saying about good things come to those who are willing to wait for it? Nothing could be closer to the truth as far as the dramatic turnaround in the Sooners’ 2023 recruiting effort.

Wait we did, and in the second half of June and into July, the floodgates opened in OU’s 2023 recruiting cycle.

Over the last 60-plus days, Oklahoma has secured 17 commitments to just not any class, but one that currently ranks No. 4 in the country, according to 247Sports, and No. 6 by Rivals. The Sooners’ recruiting classes have been ranked that high in the final tally just twice in the past 10 seasons and just four times in the past two decades.

In the past 24 hours, Venables and Company landed two highly recruited four-star prospects, growing the current class size to 22. These latest two commitments are especially meaningful because WR Anthony Evans was widely expected to go with Georgia but chose Oklahoma instead, and Alabama was all in on DB Makari Vickers, but lost out to the Sooners. You can surely bet that Venables’ national respect and reputation as a master defensive architect had a lot to do with Vickers shunning the Crimson Tide for the Sooners.

As good as it has been on the Oklahoma recruiting trail the past six weeks, it’s not over. Some experts around the country believe OU has a good chance of flipping 2023 Notre Dame safety commit Peyton Bowen and two of the best defensive ends in the 2023 class, David Hicks and Jordan Renaud reportedly are leaning in the Sooners favor.

If this trend continues, the Sooners could easily find themselves with a top two or three 2023 class. That would be the highest rated Oklahoma recruiting class since Bob Stoops’ 2005 season, when OU finished with college football’s No. 3 class.

Of course, having a top-rated recruiting class only means something if you are able to develop that perceived talent so that the results on the field are commensurate with or even higher than what the expectations of the player were as a recruit. You have to look no further than the recruiting classes of the Texas Longhorns in recent years, regularly touted as among the nation’s best, to see how top recruiting classes don’t always translate to wins on the football field

Arguably the two best Oklahoma recruiting classes since the 2000 national championship season were in 2005 and Lincoln Riley’s 2019 class. Some of the big names in the Sooners’ 2005 group were WR Juaquin Iglesias, LB Ryan Reynolds, DE C.J. Ah You, LB Curtis Loftin, DE Brody Eldridge, WRs Malcolm Kelly and Manuel Johnson and DB-turned-RB Allen Patrick.

Riley’s 2019 class included the country’s top QB recruit Spencer Rattler along with a trio of five-star WRs in Jordan Haselwood, Theo Wease and Trejan Bridges, TE Austin Stogner and RB Rhamondre Stevenson. Only Wease out of this group is still on the OU roster. The 2019 class also included current stars LB David Ugwoegbu, DE Marcu Stripling, RB Marcus Major and CB Woodi Washington.

Any way you want to look at it, any concerns about Venables being able to bring in a top-rated recruiting class, balanced with elite prospects on both offense and defense, were clearly ill-founded.

Boomer Sooner!