Two arms, one mind: Sooners’ QB commits welcoming each other’s competition

Michael Hawkins and Brendan Zurbrugg are the same age and play the same position on the football field. They’re also committed to the same university.

Beyond that, the two don’t have a ton in common.

Hawkins plays his high school ball in the bustle of the burgeoning Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which is home to nearly eight million residents. In stark contrast, Zurbrugg’s home turf is in Alliance, Ohio, a relatively quiet town of twenty thousand people.

Hawkins, the oldest of three children, was never supposed to play offense. He’s the son of a former NFL defensive back, and Mike Hawkins Sr. thought his son had a future as a lockdown corner. But as the elder Hawkins puts it, his son entered a “QB phase” as a young child and simply “never came out of it.” Meanwhile, Zurbrugg is the youngest of five children, and he comes from quarterback stock through and through. His father, who himself grew up in Alliance, played the position at the University of Michigan. In fact, back in 1984, Chris Zurbrugg came off the bench in relief of an injured starter named Jim Harbaugh and promptly set a new school record for single-game passing yards.

Throughout high school, Hawkins has focused almost exclusively on the quarterback position. He’ll run track in the offseason, but the rest of his time and energy is devoted to sharpening his skills as a signal-caller. Conversely, Zurbrugg has plenty of diversity in his athletic profile. He’s a letterman in baseball and basketball, and competes as both a sprinter and hurdler. And if he leads a touchdown drive on the gridiron, Zurbrugg isn’t coming off the field — he’ll stay out to kick the extra point, and then he’ll handle kickoff duty before finally trotting to the sideline.

And for two highly recruited quarterbacks that both ended up committing to the University of Oklahoma, their respective journeys through the recruitment process took wildly different routes.

Hawkins picked up his first Power 5 offer before he’d ever taken a varsity snap, as North Carolina State extended him an opportunity all the way back in June of 2021. It was nearly two full years later, in June of 2023, when Syracuse became the first Power 5 school to offer Zurbrugg.

Hawkins, an Oklahoma legacy who lives just two and a half hours from Norman, has visited OU more than a dozen times over the course of his recruitment. On the other hand, there’s over a thousand miles of road between Owen Field and Alliance, which naturally makes it much more difficult for Zurbrugg to visit Oklahoma on a whim. To this day, he’s only made one trip to his future campus.

Though he maintained an intentional, open-minded approach throughout his recruitment, no one was all too shocked when Hawkins announced his pledge to the Sooners. At his commitment ceremony, there wasn’t even another hat on the table. However, Zurbrugg’s path to Oklahoma’s recruiting class featured a couple of detours along the way. He committed to Syracuse in mid-June, but soon reneged on his verbal and decided on Northwestern instead. Less than a month later, the Wildcats fired longtime head coach Pat Fitzgerald, and the Oklahoma staff immediately sprung into action in an effort to flip Zurbrugg. Offer, visit and commitment all came within the span of two weeks.

For his part, Zurbrugg is aware that committing to three different schools in a single summer can create a stigma. But he’s content with the way he navigated the process, and he’s simply thankful to be off the market for good.

“It feels great,” he remarked. “I mean, people don’t really understand what happened the first two times, but I do. And I had good reasons to do what I did. And I think I was led to Oklahoma.”

And yet, for all their differences, Zurbrugg and Hawkins ended up at Oklahoma for many of the same reasons. Both run offenses with striking similarities to the Sooners’ offensive scheme, and both hold Jeff Lebby in high regard as a developer of quarterbacks. The family atmosphere and comfort level in Norman is one thing Hawkins and Zurbrugg both cited as significant factors in their decisions.

“Coach Venables has his players more disciplined and really bought into the program, and not focused on things they shouldn’t be focused on,” Hawkins noted back in April. “Because from what I’ve heard from the new coaching staff, the players weren’t really too bought in or locked in with the [old] coaching staff. It just wasn’t too good. But the [new] culture there is really big for me.”

And though both quarterbacks are less than four months away from taking their next step at Oklahoma, they’ve both got unfinished business in the meantime. One thing is certain: the Oklahoma staff’s evaluations of both Hawkins and Zurbrugg have been thoroughly validated on the gridiron this fall.

After transferring from erstwhile powerhouse Allen High this offseason, Hawkins has thrived as a senior at Frisco Emerson. In a high-octane offense that’s indisputably more conducive to his success, he’s helped the Mavericks roll to a 6-0 start. He’s taken full advantage of the luxuries afforded to him by a speedy Emerson receiver corps, which is headlined by three-star Texas State commit Kylen Evans. As a unit, the Mavs’ offense is scoring at a clip of 61 points per game.

Individually, Hawkins’ cumulative stat line this season features over 1500 yards through the air, another 300-plus on the ground and 25 total touchdowns. Those numbers become all the more impressive given proper context — Hawkins has scarcely had occasion to play a second-half drive throughout the season, as Emerson’s average margin of victory through six games is an astonishing 46 (!) points.

Keeping a zero in the loss column for the Mavericks is Hawkins’ primary objective for the moment, but the nation’s No. 2 dual-threat quarterback acknowledges that he’s pretty thrilled to see his Sooners undefeated through four games as well. And needless to say, he’s eager to prove himself worthy of situational action as a true freshman, just as Jackson Arnold has done for Oklahoma in 2023.

“It feels good,” Hawkins said. “Just them getting it done and them being more consistent with Coach V in his second year, I feel like they’re growing a lot. I feel pretty good about it. Just getting the offense down [will be] big for me. And then when the season comes, I feel like I’ll have a good amount of playing time, just getting the feel of it.”

Meanwhile, Zurbrugg is having a banner senior season of his own in northeast Ohio. The three-star has led Alliance to a 4-2 record, including a win in the district opener, and is hitting on nearly 68 percent of his passes thus far. And despite the fact that he too has earned an early exit in several contests, he’s still accounted for over 1700 yards of offense and 21 total touchdowns.

Similarly, Zurbrugg is enthused to see the Sooners’ offense clicking, and when he sits down to watch the games on Saturdays, it’s easy for him to spot recognizable concepts in Oklahoma’s offensive scheme.

“It’s so exciting,” he observed. “Their offense is electric. I’m sure if you went through and compared our film to some of the stuff they do on offense, obviously theirs is probably more advanced, but we do a lot of the same stuff.”

Historically speaking, two quarterbacks in the same recruiting class hasn’t been the norm for Oklahoma. Not since 2006 have the Sooners signed two pure signal-callers in the same cycle. So what’s the onus behind the decision to take a pair of QB’s in 2024?

Maintaining an abundance of depth at the position provides a partial motivation, especially in the wake of what transpired last year at the Cotton Bowl. For those that have understandably chosen to block out the memory of that fateful Saturday, an injury to Dillon Gabriel utterly hamstrung the Oklahoma offense for all 60 minutes of football. With third-stringer General Booty unavailable, the inept play of backup quarterback Davis Beville left the Sooners no viable alternative but to play most of the game in a wildcat formation, with tight end Brayden Willis taking the snaps. The offense couldn’t mount a scoring drive all afternoon as Texas blanked the Sooners 49-0 in one of the most lopsided outcomes in the history of the Red River Rivalry.

Especially within the context of one of college football’s most iconic and heated rivalries, a beatdown of that ilk provides all the necessary justification for stacking the QB room. Regarding the decision to recruit two quarterbacks, one source told OUInsider earlier this year, “What happened last year at the Cotton Bowl will never happen again as long as [this staff is] here. And [they’re] going to make absolutely sure of that.”

That’s fine and well, but from a practical standpoint, taking two quarterbacks in the same class is much easier said than done. In the age of the transfer portal, any Power 5 quarterback without an immediate path to playing time within two years is likely bound for another program. To that point, nearly half of all starting quarterbacks in the FBS last season were transfers.

Thus, signing two quarterbacks in the same cycle is only half the battle. Arguably the much greater challenge is retaining those two quarterbacks. From the player’s standpoint, it takes a rugged mentality and a prudent outlook to merely assent to the presence of another quarterback, let alone welcome it. But the Sooners knew that when they pursued Hawkins and Zurbrugg. That mentality and outlook is part and parcel of both players’ approach.

“It doesn’t really bother me,” said Hawkins. “It just tells me that I have to keep working; I can’t take days off. And it’s all love. Going into it, it’s going to be competition. But there’s no hate there.”

“I actually met Michael [on the visit],” said Zurbrugg. “We get along, and outside of playing quarterback, we’d be friends with each other. And regardless of what year I am or what other quarterbacks or there, no matter what school I go to, I’m gonna have to compete with other quarterbacks. So it’s not much of a big deal.”

Hawkins and Zurbrugg are proof that there’s more than one road to the same destination. And similarly, history will illustrate that there’s no cut-and-dried path to becoming the starting quarterback at Oklahoma. Caleb Williams raced into the limelight as a true freshman, and Sam Bradford only needed a redshirt year before his star rose. But for every Williams and every Bradford, there’s a Jason White, who won a Heisman Trophy in his first full season of starting duty… as a fifth-year senior. There’s a Kyler Murray, who rode pine for two full seasons before his time came. And there’s also a Landry Jones, who due to unfortunate circumstances found himself thrust into action sooner than most anyone expected.

There will be opportunity for both Hawkins and Zurbrugg to make their mark in an Oklahoma uniform. The timeline for such an opportunity is indeterminate, and they’re both cognizant of that reality. But in the meantime, the Sooners’ two quarterback commits are more than happy to coexist — and to push each other towards greatness.

The old adage is that a rising tide lifts all boats. Brent Venables has used the term “competitive depth” to encapsulate that aphorism. And come 2024, Hawkins and Zurbrugg are poised to bring more competitive depth than Oklahoma’s quarterback room has accommodated in quite some time.

Brent Venables has stated that in the process of recruiting any player, he’s rather explicit in communicating that “you’re gonna get in the back of the line like everybody else.” The Sooners’ incoming quarterback tandem will start at the bottom of the totem pole, but neither Hawkins nor Zurbrugg is expecting privileged treatment.

They both expect to work, and they’re both chomping at the bit to get started.

“Any quarterback that plays for [Oklahoma] is going to like what they do,” Zurbrugg declared. “It’s going to be tough and challenging, but you’re going to love it.”