Oklahoma football: Newest commit shows Grinch’s vision for secondary
Oklahoma football got a big commitment this past weekend when 6-foot-3, 190-pound Ryan Watts gave a verbal pledge to the Sooners.
Watts’ is No. 29 cornerback in the 2019 class according to 247 sports out of Little Elm Texas. He joins fellow 2020 cornerback Dontae Manning as recent additions to the 2020 class. Manning, a 6-foot, 175-pound Kansas City product, gave a verbal committment after the Sooners’ spring game and has been on the Oklahoma football radar since secondary coach Roy Manning arrived on campus in January.
The real story isn’t not just that the Sooners have pulled in two of the top 30 cornerbacks in the nation in a two-week period. It goes deeper than that. The two recent commits are part of a recent recruiting trend of targeting taller cornerbacks with long wingspans.
Under Mike Stoops (and perhaps more importantly Kerry Cooks) the Sooners spent years populating their roster with smaller, faster guys to match up against the speed of Big 12 defenses. It’s been a big reason we’ve seen so many Oklahoma cornerbacks get “Mossed” by some of the monster receivers that play in the conference like Iowa State’s Hakeem Butler, Texas’ Lil Jordan Humphrey and Collin Johnson and Oklahoma State’s Tylan Wallace.
The first thing Roy Manning and Alex Grinch as recruiters was part ways with a pair of 2020 cornerbacks in Jalen Huff and Darion Green-Warren. Huff and Green-Warren were both tall enough, measuring in near the six-foot mark, but for one reason or another neither seemed to fit the Sooners’ future plans for the secondary. Watching film on Dontae Manning and Ryan Watts reveals a little more about what the Sooners are going to covet in the future and what this defense could look like in 2-3 years with more aggressive press coverages on the outside and ball-hawking safeties who can make up ground in a hurry to provide help both over the top and at the line of scrimmage.
The Sooners staff took quite a bit of flack for letting two top end defensive back recruits go, particularly Green-Warren who currently ranks No. 10 overall at his position in the 2020 class. After all, it’s hard to justify a team that finished 129th in the country in pass defense last year telling three and four star corners to look elsewhere, but it also shows that for the first time in a long time they are recruiting for a specific reason and system rather than trying to pick off talented players and force them into a role that doesn’t make sense for their skillset.
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It also means that Oklahoma football fans tired of seeing soft cushion defenses giving up 10 yards every time an opposing team throws a tunnel screen may soon find some long-awaited relief.
There’s nowhere to go but up after finishing 129th in the country in pass defense a year ago.