Oklahoma football: Danny Okoye wasn’t seriously considering Sooners until after visit

Danny Okoye, the latest Oklahoma football commit for 2024, sat nervously in front of a table featuring the hats of three iconic college football programs on Wednesday night.

The occasion was a scheduled announcement at the Core Society in the Tulsa suburb of Bixby, during which Okoye was about to reveal where he would be playing college football in the fall of 2024.

For the past couple of months, the Sooner faithful had been led to believe by the media that closely follows the Oklahoma football recruiting scene that Okoye was a virtual lock to pick OU.

The highly touted, four-star edge rusher did, in fact, put on the OU cap at the Wednesday evening ceremony as most everyone assumed he would, shunning the hats of Texas and Tennessee left dejectedly on the table. From there, the celebration within the Sooner Nation for the 24th commitment in the 2024 class was officially underway.

All’s well that ends well if you’re a Sooner fan, but the backstory tells a slightly different account of how all of this came about.

The No. 1 player in the state of Oklahoma and the No. 10 edge rusher in the 2024 class, according to the 247Sports Composite, Okoye wasn’t even considering Oklahoma in the early going. He was leaning toward Tennessee and possibly Texas, but that was before he made his official visit to Norman and met Brent Venables and assistant coaches Miguel Chavis and Todd Bates.

"“I wasn’t even interested in Oklahoma at first,” Okoye told The Oklahoman recently. “I saw that 6-7 season (in 2022), and it kind of made me look at them sideways.”"

Listed at 6-foot, 4 inches and 240-pounds, Okoye received more that 30 scholarship offers. In May, the highly recruited defensive player narrowed the list down to 10. OU did make the list, but the Sooners were in competition with the likes of Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Texas, Tennessee, Nebraska, Oregon and Texas A&M and Colorado.

The home-grown defensive star visited OU on Sept. 2 on the weekend of the season opener against Arkansas State. Everything changed from there, Okoye said.

"“I really just gave them (OU) a chance,” he said. “I listened what (defensive ends) Coach Chavis was selling. I understood that one bad season doesn’t make a program.“Looking at this season, I see a big change, and I know why that change is, because I’ve been talking to them and keeping in communication with them in the offseason.”"

After his OU visit, Okoye said he really like the atmosphere and that he could buy in to everything the OU coaches were selling. “It didn’t feel fake. It felt just genuine.”

"“The amount of work they’ve put in (the Sooner coaches and players) and the amount of progress they’ve made, it’s definitely worth noticing,” Okoye told 247Sports in a recent interview.“The coaching staff is a national championship coaching staff, and I can definitely see winning the national championship in the future.”"

Okoye is the 10th defensive player and fifth defensive lineman among Oklahoma’s 24-member 2024 class so far, with the Sooners still awaiting the announcements of several other top targets. With the addition of the state’s top 2024 recruit, Oklahoma is now No. 5 in the Rivals 2024 class rankings and No. 7, according to 247Sports.