Oklahoma football: Move to SEC will only help, not hurt Sooner recruiting

It’s not football season yet — still a month and a half off — but it is very much recruiting season with July one of the most active months in the calendar for the Oklahoma football program in recent years for landing commitments.

Some college football recruiting analysts have ruminated that the Sooners’ impending move to the Southeastern Conference — where college football and football recruiting is considered next to godliness — could hurt Oklahoma’s traditional recruiting effort.

That thinking, in my opinion, is seriously misguided. Oklahoma football is a national brand and, if anything, the move to the SEC should help the Sooners by extending the footprint, irrespective of the talent-rich environment and highly competitive nature of recruiting within SEC country.

Oklahoma recruits all over the country. This isn’t something new. The Sooners have brought in talent from both coasts and everywhere in between for a number of years. That is a big reason why they have managed to have so much success and remain in the national spotlight for so long.

National radio-TV sports talk show host Colin Cowherd, the grand poobah of the Oklahoma football hate club, went so far to suggest recently that Oklahoma, when it joins the SEC, will end up like Nebraska when the Cornhuskers spiraled into irrelevance after moving to the Big Ten.

"“Is Oklahoma going to be the second program in our adult lives that disappears,” Cowherd said on his nationally syndicated “The Herd” sports talk program.“Number one,” he continued, “the state (Oklahoma) no longer produces big numbers of players.”"

The inference in Cowherd’s uninformed remark, according to former OU head coach Bob Stoops. was that Oklahoma. like Nebraska, is not a talent-rich state for football recruiting, at least not when compared to teams in the Big Ten and the SEC.

In a recent radio interview on sports radio KREF 1400’s “The Rush” program with Teddy Lehman and Tyler McComas, Stoops jumped all over Cowherd’s comment comparing Oklahoma to Nebraska, calling it a “lazy” remark from someone who’s not thinking clearly.

“We’re not just Oklahoma,” Stoops reminded listeners. “All the way down in Dallas is home territory for us — as much as it is anybody else.” And the historic recruiting numbers bear that out, not just in Dallas — but all over the Lone Star State.

For example, the 2023 Oklahoma recruiting class, a top-five class nationally, included players from 12 different states.

Five members of the 2023 class were from Texas and four from the state of Oklahoma. The largest state representation, however, was from Florida — notably in the heart of SEC country — with six players from the Sunshine State signing on with the Sooners. The 26-member class further breaks down into 14 from SEC states, three from Big Ten states and three from Pac 12 states.

And this is not just a one-year phenomenon biased by Oklahoma’s imminent move to the SEC. This type of distribution has been going on for quite some time, and certainly since Stoops was head coach.

So any suggestion that Oklahoma’s recruiting will be hurt because of the move to the SEC is not supported by the facts. If anything, the move should help the Sooner recruiting effort.

"“We fit in the SEC perfectly,” Stoops said. “I believe it’s going to help us recruit. And I believe we’ll handle it just fine.”"