2022 four-star safety backs off a pledge to Clemson one day after Brent Venables leaves Clemson to be Sooners head coach.
The Oklahoma Sooners and their fans are no strangers to what the Clemson Tigers community is feeling right now. Losing a coach to another school and picking up the pieces in the wake of it all is no easy thing.
For the Tigers, they lost their beloved defensive coordinator, who is one of the three best defensive coordinators in the country. With Brent Venables leaving Clemson to come home to Norman, dominoes were eventually bound to start falling.
Once a coordinator or head coach leaves, things start happening from a personnel standpoint. Players begin to re-evaluate their roles and recruits begin to think extra hard about those commitments.
The Sooners lost nine commitments between the 2022 and 2023 classes before they finally signed a new head coach.
The Clemson Tigers just lost their first commit since Brent Venables accepted the job at Oklahoma. Four-star safety Keon Sabb out of IMG Academy in Florida announced he was re-opening his recruitment.
Sabb is a big six foot two 200 pound safety who may end up being a smaller sub-package linebacker due to his frame being able to carry additional weight. He is still largely developmental as he was a basketball player mainly for a few years. Regardless, there’s some real untapped potential there and that’s why Brent Venables took the reigns and was his primary recruiter while he was still at Clemson.
Here’s the thing, Sabb holds an Oklahoma offer from 2020 that came from former defensive coordinator Alex Grinch. The Sooners only have one safety prospect committed in Robert Spears-Jennings.
With the possibility of Delarrin Turner-Yell and Pat Fields leaving school, the depth in the room takes a hit. So, there’s reason to believe Sabb could be a take, especially with the Sooners only having 13 committed players at this particular moment.
On the flip side, Sabb named a top six of Clemson, Georgia, LSU, Oregon, Penn State, and Texas A&M in June before eventually committing to Clemson. At some point between then, Michigan got heavily involved. So much so that Steve Wiltfong of 247Sports put in a crystal ball for Michigan despite Sabb being committed to Clemson still. That particular crystal ball was put in on November 27th. Can’t imagine things have changed that drastically between Michigan and Sabb in just under three weeks.
Who knows how this saga ends but it’s clear that Venables’ decision is causing some ripple effects among the Clemson recruiting classes. It’s reasonable to think that it may be the same case with the current Clemson roster as things go forward.
For now, we’re in wait-and-see mode as Brent Venables has already started making his rounds as he tries to regroup and piece together the pieces of a 2022 Oklahoma recruiting class that was broken by Lincoln Riley’s move to USC.
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