It's no particular secret that the year 2025 is pivotal for Oklahoma's football program and the current leadership therein, starting with head coach Brent Venables.

And the Sooners are very serious about righting the ship after last year's bizarre and snakebitten 6-7 campaign, as evidenced by the high-dollar additions of quarterback John Mateer, running back Jaydn Ott, offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle and general manager Jim Nagy. As a program, Oklahoma has gone to great lengths to ensure that the sheer schizophrenia of last season — i.e., a 24-3 throttling of Alabama sandwiched between an inexplicable collapse at Missouri and a barely competitive drubbing at LSU — is a blip and not a trend.

However, inconsistent play on the gridiron has ramifications in the world of recruiting. Here in late April, the Sooners have the No. 42 recruiting haul in the nation and boast just four verbal commits in the 2026 class. With regard to timeline and trajectory, it's reminiscent of Oklahoma's efforts in the 2024 recruiting cycle, which itself came on the heels of a 6-7 campaign in the 2022 season. It wasn't until March of 2023 that the Sooners finally nabbed their first commit of the cycle in four-star CB Jeremiah Newcombe.

But all's well that ends well, and despite the sluggish start, OU eventually signed the No. 7 recruiting class in the nation for the 2024 cycle. The Sooners had to wait until the fall to coax some of their more integral commits into the class, such as blue-chip defenders Michael Boganowski, Nigel Smith, Danny Okoye and Reggie Powers. But that was easily accomplished when the Sooners ripped off seven consecutive wins to start the year and eventually turned in a 10-2 regular-season record. The final piece to the puzzle was the nation's top interior offensive lineman, Eddy Pierre-Louis, who waffled between OU and UCF before settling on the Sooners just days prior to the December signing period.

Will there be a similar effect for Oklahoma in the 2026 cycle? It's hard to say, as Nagy's arrival has naturally prompted a bit of an overhaul to the recruiting board. The longtime NFL front-office mainstay has established a brand-new scouting staff, recently hiring assistant general manager Taylor Redd and director of high school scouting Kale Pearson to aid in his talent-acquisition efforts.

But one storyline is surfacing in the still-early stages of the 2026 cycle, and it centers around the reality that there's unlikely to be a great deal of in-state representation in the Sooners' signing class.

To that point, there are seven prospects within state lines that have received an Oklahoma offer. The majority of those prospects are highly unlikely to wind up in Oklahoma's signing class. Let's examine each of their respective recruitments in turn, and then zoom out to get a glimpse at the overall picture.