Sooner Summit is Here
Has any recruit ever been more serious about a verbal commitment than Caleb Williams?
Oklahoma’s 5-star 2021 quarterback is in Norman today, and will be for the next four days as he gets together — informally, of course — with other Sooner recruits in the 2021 class.
The anticipated dozen or so recruits in Norman with Williams include prospects that have committed to Oklahoma, but also some that have not decided.
Williams is, for the moment, their primary recruiter.
This isn’t an official visit for anyone. This isn’t even an unofficial visit.
This is the Sooner Summit.
None of the next four days is organized by Lincoln Riley or Annie Hanson or their staff (although they surely have offered their input).
“There’s not gonna be coaches and things like that because it's an NCAA dead period,” Williams told SI All-American. “They can’t talk to us. They can’t be around us. They can’t really help us with anything like that. This is all us recruits coming together under a common agenda.”
The plan is to just hang out and bond. Williams wants to get to the committed ones better, and wants to show the uncommitted ones what’s possible.
The plan is to acclimate and relax on Thursday, then Friday and Saturday the itineraries are jam packed with events, meals and activities in Norman and Oklahoma City. Some recruits are coming Friday, some Saturday, but there’s a big dinner planned for Saturday night where all the visitors are expected. Then Sunday, the Williamses will fly back to Washington, D.C.
Not only is Williams hanging out for several days with OU recruits, but his family is with him. In fact, his mom Dayna flew down on Tuesday to begin the house-hunting process.
She and her husband Carl are going to live in the Oklahoma City area while Caleb goes to school in Norman.
Again, has any recruit ever been more invested?
“We want him to have a steadying force,” Carl Williams told The Athletic. “We’re not gonna live with him or stay on top of him, but we want to be close enough to where he can get to us instead of being thousands of miles away. She eventually got me on the same page.”
Caleb Williams makes no bones about it: he’s coming to Oklahoma to win a national championship. Big 12 trophies are nice and College Football Playoff trips add prestige, but Williams wants to add No. 8 to the Oklahoma pantheon.
To do that, he knows he’s going to need more than a fleet of wide receivers and a stable of talented backs. Williams has been putting the hard-sell on those positions, sure, but he’s also been recruiting offensive linemen and defensive standouts.
The plan is to bring them all to the Sooner Summit and get them on board with his vision of a national title.
“We’ve got a bunch of good recruits coming in, a bunch of good guys overall coming,” he said. “Good families. I’ll be honest, I can’t wait to meet some of the people that I haven’t met. Most of these recruits I haven’t met. Most of these families I haven’t met. So I’m excited to be there, see them, bring some energy, have a smile on my face with all the guys than I would normally with our unofficials and our officials, but since we can’t, it’s a really good time to kind of connect with those people that I would normally be able to see without the pandemic.”
He and his family have begun looking at properties that have specific amenities because he’s not going to stop recruiting when he gets to OU. However long he’s in college, he hopes to be the point man on future recruiting endeavors, and he wants his parents’ place the place to hang out for both recruits and teammates.
“I’ll be able to have the linemen over there, get in the pool, hop on the game, play games, get on the grill and things like that, cook and just have a good time with the guys whenever we want, just get away from campus,” he said.
“And also kind of cool because I can, like I said, just invite the guys over and have a good time, be around them more, spend some quality time with the guys, kind of just build … a brotherhood, build a bond and a trust between the other recruits that are coming to this, the Sooner Summit. It’s the same thing I would do for the guys that are already there and the guys that are coming there with me and after me.”
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