Oklahoma won’t have much of an opportunity for major recruiting weekends during the initial home games of the 2018 season.
The season opener vs. Florida Atlantic is at 11 a.m. CST, while the marquee non-conference matchup vs. UCLA is at noon, making it incredibly difficult to get recruits from across the country to Norman in a timely fashion.
That’s a downer, for sure, but the one gift that keeps giving is the OU spring game. The Sooners brought the house more than three months ago and yet another official visitor is calling #NewWave19 his home.
Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) St. Thomas Aquinas cornerback Jaden Davis picking the Sooners on Wednesday night means 10 of OU’s 16 commits for the 2019 class were in Norman sometime during that weekend.
Heading into the April 13 weekend, the only two commits visiting were:
Stogner was on his official visit, while Bridges made his way to Norman mid-day Saturday after taking the ACT in the morning.
Things changed quickly with commitments galore during the weekend:
Henderson, Wease and Morris committed in a two-hour time period that Friday afternoon, while Green re-entered the fold Saturday afternoon. All four were on official visits.
Since then, it has been a mixture of official visitors and unofficial visitors making the call with Davis being the latest official visitor to declare his intentions.
Ndoma-Ogar and Major were both on unofficial visits, while Wete made an official visit to Norman that April weekend.
Add it all up and 63 percent of OU’s 2019 class so far were on campus that weekend. Going beyond that weekend and Davis becomes the third commitment in the secondary for OU this month.
It started with Green-Warren providing some recruiting fireworks July 4. Washington followed two days later to give defensive backs coach Kerry Cooks back-to-back Rivals 100 commitments in the span of 48 hours.
Davis is another prominent piece as Davis and Washington almost closes the door on the cornerback position in 2019. If the right guy came along, then maybe OU would make an exception because the Sooners are sitting pretty with Davis and Washington right now.
Head coach Lincoln Riley took a gamble by making the spring game a mega-recruiting event. But as we saw, as we’re seeing and what we’ll continue to see, yep, it’s paying off.