Signing Day Is Nearly Upon Us

Yes, college football fans, tomorrow is National Signing Day, the biggest day of the offseason for college football. Much like the NFL draft, but so much more; at this level, it's still about pride and guts and skill and attitude. Money can be a consideration, but the financial angle for these guys is still a little way off.

Everyone keeps saying that the upcoming season will be a rebuilding season for the Sooners, and maybe they're right in some ways. But each year, Bob Stoops loses big-time players at critical positions, and every year he brings another great team onto the field. While recruiting this year will be very important for OU, Stoops' methodology is not completely about recruiting (unlike a certain school a few hours south of Norman, across the Red River). Bob Stoops is the master, the guru, the all-time greatest at taking raw talent and putting it to its best and most effective use. Case in point: in the 2000 season, in only his second year as OU's head coach, he took the team all the way to a 13-0 undefeated season and OU's 7th National Championship. This feat in itself, is amazing, but the bigger point is this: Stoops did this not with his own talent, talent that he recruited himself, but mostly with players recruited by John Blake. Blake was absolutely abysmal at using his players' abilities properly. That's why he lost with those same players that Stoops later took to a National Championship.

OU's recruiting class is already ranked highly by several of the major recruiting services and websites, based on non-verbal commitments. It's incredibly exciting to see how many promising players with tremendous talent want to play for Stoops, and they want to play for him for the same reasons we want to watch him. He is a blacksmith, taking raw talent, molding and shaping it, folding it with the hammer of discipline on the anvil of perseverance, until he has created a beautiful masterpiece that storms onto the field and leaves victories and championships in their wake. Ah, the promise of another year...

Patience, fellow Sooners...the new season is only 7 months away...

Boomer Sooner!!!