Oklahoma's personnel management and the NFL Draft: Part one
Every year, college football programs get the equivalent of an annual physical in the form of the NFL draft. To be sure, a prolific assembly line of players heading to the pros doesn’t guarantee a team’s success at the college level. But draft classes do serve as status checks on how programs are acquiring and developing talent.
In that regard, the NFL talent evaluators gave the Oklahoma Sooners a disappointing assessment in the latest draft cycle. The three Sooner selections marked the first time since 2007 that OU sent fewer than four players to the big leagues.
Due to pandemic-induced oddities in eligibility rules, the players eligible for the 2024 NFL draft started college as far back as 2018 and and as recently as 2021. So a post mortem on OU’s draft class really starts with the four seasons in which Lincoln Riley oversaw OU’s personnel as head coach of the Sooners. A closer look at the data from that period also speaks to the challenges new coach Brent Venables has faced in the last two seasons.
In this first article of a two-part series, we’ll dig into the Sooners’ recent draft history and player movement into and out of the program.
First, we can classify a total of 13 scholarship players from OU’s 2023 team as “draft-available:”
DL Rondell Bothroyd
DL Isaiah Coe
OL Tyler Guyton
DL Jordan Kelley
DL Jonah Laulu
OL McKade Mettauer
DB Reggie Pearson
OL Andrew Raym
OL Walter Rouse
OL Caleb Shaffer
TE Austin Stogner
WR Drake Stoops
DL Marcus Stripling
Guyton, Laulu and Rouse heard their names called during this year’s festivities. Those three share in common that they transferred to OU from other schools. That seems logical when you consider how many scholarship players recruited to Norman prior to Venables’ arrival for the 2022 season eventually transferred out of the program.
Let’s look at OU’s personnel inflows and outflows of scholarship players based on the years between 2018 and 2021 in which they joined the program. (N.B.: All data compiled from On3.) We’ll divide the players up between recruits, including high school and junior college players, and transfers. As for players who transferred out of the program, we’ll define them as players who transferred/entered the transfer portal and did not return to OU before exhausting their eligibility.
In the four-year period from ‘18 to ‘21, a total of 96 new players joined the program. That consisted of 86 recruits and 10 transfers.
Of those 96 players, nearly half, 47, eventually transferred out after they entered the program. Forty-six of the 47 transfers came from the population of 86 recruits. (The only player to transfer into and out of OU from that period? Key Lawrence, who transferred to OU from Tennessee in 2021 and left this offseason for Ole Miss.)
Notably, a majority of the recruits from the 2019, 2020 and 2021 cycles ultimately transferred out of the program:
14 of 23 in 2019
14 of 23 in 2020
12 of 16 in 2021
The upshot: Of the three recruiting classes that preceded Venables’ start as head coach for the 2022 season, 40 of the 62 players who signed with OU eventually dipped out.
The draft production of OU’s recruiting classes between 2018 and 2021 doesn’t look too hot at this point. In the drafts between 2021 and 2024, twelve of the 86 recruits (14%) in those four recruiting classes have been drafted:
LB Brian Asamoah
DL Nik Bonitto
DB Jaden Davis
OL Anton Harrison
WR Marvin Mims
DL Ronnie Perkins
QB Spencer Rattler
RB Rhamondre Stevenson
DB Delarrin Turner-Yell
QB Caleb Williams
TE Brayden Willis
DL Perrion Winfrey
Nine were selected out of OU, while the other three were picked after transferring out. Players who transferred to Norman during the period from ‘18 to ‘21 have a better hit rate, with four of 10 getting picked by pro teams:
RB Eric Gray
QB Jalen Hurts
OL Wanya Morris
WR Mike Woods
In the second article in this series, we’ll draw some conclusions about OU’s personnel management and player development under the previous coaching regime.