While Halloween has passed for this year, the Sooners found themselves with a lot of treats as they enter the month of November. On the field, they made a switch at QB and their offense has seen a massive uptick.
Off the field, recruiting efforts of two years or more paid off in a big way as the Sooners landed two of the top 50 players in USA TODAY Sports’ High School Composite Player Rankings.
Gentry Williams and Gabriel Brownlow-Dindy both have ties to the Sooner state. Dindy is an Oklahoma legacy, the son of two former Sooners who then moved to Florida, where he’s spent the majority of his life. Williams is an in-state star from Tulsa, Oklahoma who grew up rooting for the Sooners. Both are major defensive additions for a Sooners team flipping the script on the narrative of how the Sooners play defense in Norman these days.
On3 recruiting put together a list of a few teams that won the month of October in recruiting and Oklahoma’s efforts landed them in the company of recruiting juggernauts like Alabama and Georgia.
Chad Simmons of On3 wrote this on Oklahoma:
Lincoln Riley wants to keep the best of the best at home and he did that with Gentry Williams. Schools like Arkansas, Florida and USC gave the four-star athlete something to compare the Sooners to, but he committed to the in-state school.
Williams wasn’t the only highly-touted defender to commit to the Sooners last month. Oklahoma went into Florida to land five-star defensive lineman Gabriel Brownlow-Dindy. The No. 3 player in the country chose Oklahoma over Texas A&M. Dindy’s parents graduated from Oklahoma. – Simmons
Both are massive headliners for a consensus Top 8 class across all recruiting services. With the way Oklahoma’s depth chart projects for the next year, it’s very likely both players see the field early as well.
On top of the pledges of Williams and Brownlow-Dindy, Oklahoma hosted Nicholas Anderson over the Halloween weekend. If the Anderson name raises your eyebrows, it’s because he’s the younger brother of former Sooners running back Rodney Anderson. The familiarity, the fact that Oklahoma had no commits at receiver all led to a perfect storm. Anderson joined the 2022 class on Nov. 1 but his Halloween visit proved more than enough to flip the former Oregon commit.
So taking into account Anderson’s visit and commitment, the Sooners seemingly landed three commits at three important positions in need of talent over the course of October. It was a month full of treats, king-size candy if you must. The Sooners head into November with a mountain of recruiting momentum and look poised to add more over the next few months.