Blatant Homerism: Combine wake-up call for Sooners
For the second year in a row, a trio of Oklahoma Sooners – defensive back Billy Bowman, defensive lineman Ethan Downs and linebacker Danny Stutsman – worked out at the NFL’s annual scouting combine in Indianapolis last week. That seems like a distressing comment on the talent level at a program that sent an average of seven players per year to the meat market from 2018 to 2023. Of course, it also fits with OU’s 22-17 overall record in the last three seasons.
Complain about Brent Venables’ game management and offensive coordinators all you want, but a lack of studs provides the easiest explanation for OU’s malaise during his tenure. And if you’re tired of hearing about Lincoln Riley’s poor stewardship of the program at the end of his run with the Sooners, shut your ears.
How did OU get to this point? You can’t blame it on Venables’ recruiting. He signed his first high school class after taking over at OU in 2022. That was three years ago; all we can conclude about the quality of OU’s evaluations during that period is that Venables and his staff didn’t land any players in that first class who declared early for the draft. We will get our first true referendum on Venables’ prep evaluations in 2026.
On the other hand, the farther away we get from Riley’s time in Norman, it becomes more evident that he had made a mess of OU’s roster by the time he left. The NFL’s light interest in players recruited by the Sooners’ last head coach is just the latest example. The three OU players who participated in this year’s combine are among the eight Sooners invited in the last three years who signed with Riley out of high school and played at OU after he took the USC job. Meanwhile, a total of four of OU’s signees under Riley earned invites in the last three years after transferring away from the program: Spencer Rattler (South Carolina), Caleb Williams (USC), Theo Wease (Missouri) and Jalin Conyers (Texas Tech via Arizona State).
And, no, there’s no reason to believe Venables failed at developing a bunch of potential studs bequeathed to him by Riley. Keep in mind that a total of 29 players who stayed with the Sooners after the coaching change eventually transferred, and Wease is the only one who earned an invitation to the combine. Not to mention, three players who transferred to OU on Riley’s watch stuck around and did get invites after playing for the new coaching regime (Eric Gray, Wanya Morris and Michael Turk).
Speaking of transfers, you could make a better case that Venables and his staff have fallen short here vis a vis the NFL combine.
To the credit of the OU coaches, they nabbed combine invitees Tyler Guyton and Walter Rouse out of the transfer portal. It’s also fair to point out that Dillon Gabriel played for Venables for two seasons before finishing his career at Oregon – he got a combine invitation this year. (Hawaii transfer Jonah Laulu wasn’t invited to the combine in 2024, but he was drafted.)
That’s still just a tiny fraction of the dozens of transfers who joined OU’s program between 2022 and 2024. The unfortunate reality is that the Sooners have allocated a significant number of scholarships to transfers who are role players and expected them to be front-line contributors. Players like C.J. Coldon and McKade Mettauer gave it their all in the short time they were with the program, but a low ceiling doesn’t get any higher just because you hit it.
The flip side: Lincoln Riley’s subpar roster building prior to his departure left Venables and Co. with little choice but to go heavy on transfers to fill in so many gaps. In that scenario, you’re going to have to reach for replacements. To be sure, Venables and his staff could have done a better job with their evaluations of transfer candidates, but they got dealt a bad hand at the start.
The good news for OU is that things like NFL combine invitations and draft picks are retrospective indicators. They tell you what kind of talent a program had or how its players developed, but they offer little insight into the future.
Bowman, Downs and Stutsman performed well at the combine. All three look like surefire draft picks at this point. After spending three years with the current OU coaching staff, that seems like a good sign.
More importantly, the 2025 squad will consist exclusively of players recruited and evaluated by Venables. If OU flops on the field, that won’t reflect well on the head coach. However, consider how many players on the ‘25 roster who will be eligible for the 2026 draft could conceivably wind up in Indianapolis next year:
R Mason Thomas
Deion Burks
Damonic Williams
Gracen Halton
John Mateer
Kip Lewis
Robert Spears-Jennings
Kendal Daniels
Marvin Jones Jr.
Gentry Williams
Not all of those players will get invitations to the combine. Even so, compare that crop against the handful of prospects at OU you could say were in the same boat at this time a year ago.
All this feels consistent with a program emerging from a rebuild. We can argue over whether Venables has done enough to address the problems he inherited four years ago, but it’s still the reality of the situation.
The enshittification continues
Blogger Coy Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022 to describe the cycle of platform decay in online products.
Essentially, Doctorow posits that such products start off great to appeal to new users. Vendors then water the products down to attract business customers. In the final stage of the enshittification cycle, shareholders extract for themselves all value the products hold, render the products useless to both individual users and businesses. (If you’ve done a Google search recently, you have a good idea of what enshittification looks like.)
Doctorow warned last year that enshittification “is coming for absolutely everything,” and stories about developments like changes to the College Football Playoff and the ACC’s death spiral of a lawsuit settlement are giving off major enshittification vibes. To the detriment of the sport’s core fans, the people who are ostensibly in charge started shaping college football to suit the needs of major media companies decades ago.
All signs now point to the major players squeezing out the vast majority of programs from the market for media rights in the near future. It’s the kind of move that will fatten the revenues of some athletic departments and enhance ESPN’s profit margins. Ultimately, however, it will irreparably diminish enthusiasm and interest in the sport.