The final stop of the Oklahoma Coaches Caravan brought football coach Brent Venables, men’s basketball coach Porter Moser and women’s basketball coach Jennie Baranczyk to the Omni Hotel in Oklahoma City.
Four weeks, seven cities, bringing it all back home for the last one as an indicator that it’s just about time to get back to work.
Summer enrollees and all the other players are set to hit campus again next week, and it’ll be time for summer conditioning and getting that much closer to the season.
A new chapter for the 11 new Sooners in football and four for Moser and the transfers coming along for all the programs.
“Anxiousness and anticipation of that is always a really fun time,” Venables said. “Going to college is all about transformation. Going from boyhood to manhood. When you’re dealing with college football, that’s part of the transformation, too… We’re in that business. That’s one of the funnest parts of being a coach – to be a part of that transformation. There is a lot to be excited about for everybody.”
OU football has added three transfers and a late 2022 commitment in the last two weeks in quarterbacks Davis Beville and General Booty and wide receivers J.J. Hester and LV Bunkley-Shelton.
Because none of them have officially signed and been cleared, Venables couldn’t talk about them individually but did say why it was so imperative to keep adding following spring practice.
“We needed depth. We need depth at that position,” said Venables at quarterback. “We need some guys to come in and compete and make everyone better. I think we added value in doing so. Experience was critical to help to give some time to other guys to grow and mature as well. We definitely made ourselves better there.”
He said the experience at receiver was a huge reason why the Sooners looked in that direction, too.
Here comes the next wave
OU fans got a taste of what the 2022 class can bring to the table during the spring with the mid-year enrollees. Here comes the rest of them, anchored by proven metrics like length and speed.
If the track season taught OU fans anything, it’s that they have every right to be fired up about the group set to arrive in the next week.
“Length and speed, those are both — that will never change in this game,” Venables said. “Certainly, you want guys to be good football players, which they both are. They are amazing football players. The freakiness of both of them — Sawchuk, he takes fast. You thought Gentry Williams was fast.
“And then the freakiness of Jayden Rowe. He’s all of 6-3, might be closer to 6-4, he’s 220 pounds. So we’ll have a dilemma on our hands. Where do we put this guy? What a great problem to have because literally you feel like he could potentially fill in at a lot of different places. So it gives you a lot of flexibility with his size and his speed.”
The speed of those guys. The size and physicality of offensive tackles Jake Taylor and Jacob Sexton. The raw potential of someone like defensive end R Mason Thomas. There is a lot to like at various positions with the new batch.
Moser adds two more
There are still two open scholarship spots for Moser, but there is zero panic from the staff because they know they hit a couple of home runs in the last month.
OU hosted under the radar high school center Luke Northweather and Nevada transfer guard Grant Sherfield on official visits during spring football game weekend.
It took a while for it all to be official, but Northweather and Sherfield are both Sooners. Northweather committed the following week and was announced as signed earlier this week.
The Missouri Gatorade Player of the Year averaged 29 points and 11 rebounds per game as a senior and picked OU over Missouri and Wisconsin, among others.
“I’m really excited about him,” Moser said. “He is a prototypical, versatile five. He can really shoot. He’s mobile. He’s already 235 (pounds). He’s really skilled. He didn’t play on the shoe circuit. I think that’s why he didn’t get seen as much. That benefited us. I really like him a lot. He’s a high-level, character kid. I think he’s really skilled.”
Then the news broke this week about Sherfield deciding to withdraw from the NBA Draft and transfer to the Sooners.
Sherfield had been going through the process, and OU stayed in constant communication with him. It’s a balancing act, but one that paid off for OU and Moser when Sherfield made the call.
He averaged more than 19 points and six assists per game last season.
“We signed Grant Sherfield, who I think is just a high-level player,” Moser said. “He can obviously score the ball. He was fifth in the country in assists and averaged more than four rebounds. He’s a great kid. Very versatile and dynamic offensively. We needed that. We had some holes to fill.”
Northweather and Sherfield are added to George Washington transfer Joe Bamisile as OU is addressing its needs for scoring and shooting. Sherfield and Bamisile are both two-time transfers, so a waiver will be necessary for them to be eligible for the 2022-23 season.
