Sooner Fans Need to Trust the Process – Even if Recruiting Rankings Don’t

Nagy’s Scouting Model Will Ensure OU Remains Competitive in Revenue Sharing Era of College Football – if Fan Base Gives it Time to Work

Let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the room: Oklahoma’s current recruiting class ranks 21st according to Rivals/On3 and a stunning 41st in 247Sports' latest composite.

Now before you start lighting torches and booking flights to Norman to demand answers from Brent Venables and new general manager Jim Nagy, allow me to offer a perspective that’s been developing among those of us who cover Oklahoma football daily, who talk to the people involved, and who actually understand the strategy behind what’s happening.

This is not a crisis.

It’s a calculated pivot.

It’s also exactly why Kchris Griffin, Chris Mason and I have been urging patience from Sooner Nation for the better part of three months since Nagy was hired to run OU's scouting/player personnel department.

As Mason puts it so accurately, this is "the sausage process" — and like with any good sausage, you don’t want to watch how it’s made.

But if done right, it’ll taste like a championship.

Why the Rankings Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Let’s break it down. Recruiting services like 247Sports, On3/Rivals and ESPN are heavily driven by exposure, camps and visibility. Their entire business model relies on subscriptions and traffic driven by top-rated players attending high-profile events they sponsor.

This isn't a conspiracy — it's capitalism.

That means the prospects who attend those camps, often held in traditional recruiting hotbeds like Georgia, Florida, Texas and California, tend to get the lion's share of attention and stars. But what about the elite athlete in Kansas who doesn't have the money to travel to a 247 mega-camp in Miami? Or the multi-sport phenom in rural Oklahoma who doesn't even know what an On3 profile is?

Those players don’t get rated the same way. Sometimes they don’t get rated at all.

And that’s where Jim Nagy and Brent Venables come in.

Nagy, who spent more than two decades in NFL front offices and made his name turning the Senior Bowl into a legitimate NFL scouting proving ground, isn't evaluating talent based on a star system. He’s doing it the way they do in the pros: with tape, character assessments and a proprietary grading scale.

"We've got a grading scale we're going to stick to," Nagy said this week on Fox Sports' Triple Option Podcast with Rob Stone, Urban Meyer and Mark Ingram. "In the NFL, there's a numbers-based grading scale. There's a color-based scale. That’s what we're going with here — and that's also going to dictate how we spend on players as well."

Translation: If you’re a 3-star on Rivals but you’re graded like a 5-star on OU’s internal board, the Sooners are going to recruit you like a 5-star. And they're going to do it without getting into a bidding war with Texas, Oregon or Ohio State.

OU's NIL Philosophy: Find Value, Not Hype

It’s no secret that Oklahoma isn’t throwing bags of NIL money at every kid with a high rating and an Instagram following. With the newly-implemented $20.5 million revenue share salary cap, programs like OU are going to have to be more judicious than ever with how they spend that money.

Nagy knows this well. "If you don't have a structure in place, you're going to be all over the place with paying players," he said. "And then the next thing you know, you're going to be over the cap."

In other words, OU is taking the long view. They’re not just trying to win the recruiting war in July — they’re trying to win football games in November, and playoff games in January. That means building a roster with depth, with culture fits, with guys who will stay and develop and bleed crimson.

That is the epitome of value.

The History of OU and 5-Stars: A Mixed Bag

Sooner fans love to talk about Adrian Peterson, Tommie Harris, Joe Mixon and Gerald McCoy. All 5-star players. All program-changing talents.

But how often do we talk about Rhett Bomar, Spencer Rattler, Jackson Arnold (so far), Jermie Calhoun, Jadon Haselwood or Trey Metoyer? That’s a long list of 5-star guys who either flamed out, transferred or never quite lived up to expectations in Norman.

OU has won a hell of a lot of football games with guys like Baker Mayfield (walk-on), Trent Williams and Sam Bradford (3-stars) or Creed Humphrey (a 4-star, but not until late in the recruiting cycle).

It's not about the stars. It’s about the fit. And it’s about development.

"The Saban Effect" and the Blueprint

On The HOF College Football Late Shift (56:49)  Saturday night, Marcus Dent, Host of The GridIron Insight and father of OU offensive Tackle Isaiah Dent, made a critical point.

"They used to call it the Saban Effect," Dent said on the show — where players got a rankings boost simply because Nick Saban offered them. “They could be a Zero-Star, but once they got that offer, they went straight to the top.”

But it didn’t happen overnight.

Saban recruited the guys he believed in. He developed them. He won championships. THEN, recruiting sites started REACTING to Alabama’s offers, not the other way around.

That’s what Jim Nagy and Brent Venables are trying to create in Norman. But, it won’t happen immediately, either.

The moment OU wins with this model — when that 3-star linebacker from Nebraska becomes a Butkus finalist, or that overlooked QB from a low-rated Dallas-Metroplex program like Little Elm transfers in and wins an SEC championship — 247 Sports and Rivals/On3 will start adjusting THEIR grades to match OU’s.

We saw it with Clemson, too. In 2016, Swinney and Venables won a national title with a Blue-Chip Ratio under 60%. That means less than 60% of the roster was made up of 4- and 5-star players. You know what they had instead? A team full of guys that fit their culture, worked their butts off and were coached into greatness.

OU is trying to be that outlier again.

The Risks Are Real

Of course, this isn’t without risk. The Sooner fanbase – as well all know – is impatient. Social media makes every recruiting win or loss feel existential. And Brent Venables isn’t exactly sitting on an unlimited honeymoon phase anymore.

If Oklahoma struggles this fall, if the offense sputters or the defense can’t get stops, you can bet recruiting rankings will be the first club critics use to beat this staff over the head with. That’s the nature of the beast.

But if Nagy and Venables are right, and if this class turns out to be full of diamonds mined from under-the-radar programs in flyover states, then Venables will be hailed as a visionary. And Nagy will have changed the recruiting game.

Sooner Nation, Here's the Ask

You want stars? Go stare at the composite rankings and panic.

You want wins? Trust the process.

No one’s asking you to be content with mediocrity. No one’s waving the white flag to Texas or conceding to the SEC programs that stack the most 5-stars.

What we are asking is that you understand this model, appreciate the why, and recognize that Oklahoma isn’t trying to copy the Bamas and Georgias of the world. They’re trying to beat them.

Not with hype, but with substance.

And if we know anything about this program’s history, it’s that when OU zigged while everyone else zagged, greatness usually followed.

So grab a seat, crack a cold one and stop worrying about July rankings.

The only stars that matter are the ones that led to championship trophies — and there’s room in the Switzer Center for more.