Football fans -- in fact, fans of every team sport -- recognize that the best team doesn't always win. Rather, it's the best team that particular day that generally comes out on top.
The best teams, however, are the ones that have the best collection of talent, and the difference between the good teams and the great teams is the ability of the great teams to sustain a high level of elite talent over time.
The college football recruiting rankings provide us an indication of a program like Oklahoma's ability to recruit the best talent available on a national basis and compare that with other teams in its conference and other top programs around the country. Of course, the recruitment piece is only part of the talent equation; the development piece is the true difference maker and what brings out the best in every prospect, regardless of the individual star rating.
Oklahoma has recruited a top-10 class in each of the last three recruiting cycles, according to 247Sports, all on Brent Venables' watch.
Oklahoma is now a member of the SEC, a conference that is widely regarded to have the highest prevalence of blue-chip talent of any Power Four conference. This got us wondering how the Sooners' collective talent coming into the 2024 season stacks up against other SEC teams as well on a national scale.
As it turns out, the college football staff at 247Sports were pondering the same thing and have done the work for us. For the purposes of the talent ranking, 247Sports factored the number of blue-chip recruits currently on the roster of every college team. A blue-chip recruit is defined as a player rated as a five- or four-star prospect at the time of his signing. The sum total of the blue-chip players on the 2024 rosters of each team is the basis of the ranking.
The Sooners have four five-star recruits on their 2024 roster, headed by starting quarterback Jackson Arnold, 53 four-star players and 28 rated as three stars. Based on the 247 Sports analysis, Oklahoma is the eighth most talented FBS program for the 2024 college football program and the fifth best out of the SEC.
Given the talent factor, or at least how it sorts out on paper, Oklahoma should have a roster worthy of winning as many as nine or ten regular-season games this season. But, as we all know, games are not won on paper, they're won on the field of play, and the Sooners have not performed up to that expectation, at least not offensively, through the first two weeks of the season.
There's still a lot of the season remaining, but after this week the talent level and quality of the competition ramps up considerably as Oklahoma heads into the conference schedule.