Oklahoma Sooners wide receivers could be key to 2024 college football success as fall camp kicks off

The Oklahoma Sooners have had an interesting offseason and pretty much all of the focus has been on their wide receiver room. They have speed, they have route running, strength and whatever other miscellaneous attribute may be required to be a good WRs. That is crucial when the team has a quarterback as inexperienced as Jackson Arnold is.

Arnold hardly featured last season and is coming into his sophmore season of college football, not to mention his first year as a full-time starter. He competes against the best teams in the country in the hardest conference in college football, playing against defenses.

Therefore he will require some guys to throw the ball to that can run a deep route and also make something out of it after the catch. Fortunately, head coach Brent Venables has done a pretty good job for experienced talent around Arnold for the 2024 season, effectively, and beyond.

With the start of the fall camp beginning Wednesday July 31 for the Sooners, the team will begin to see exactly what they have in store for the up coming season. They first witnessed it during spring camp and later got a brief look during the scrimmage game and the real effort that they are putting in will be a part of regular season where the Sooners aim to play for a playoff.

The sooners have a promising wide receiver room that needed to step up for this season.

This paper’s focus is on the wide receiver position of the Oklahoma Sooners team and a preview on the fall camp drills.

Projected Starting Wide Receivers

Deion Burks

Jalil Farooq

Nic Anderson

For the spring game scrimmage the biggest standout was Burks. Onesmus did not disappoint with Arnold when it came to the deep passing game, screens, and any other way possible to utilize the kind of crazy speed a player like him possesses. Unfortunately for the Sooners, they will utilize him a lot in this new, non-Jeff Lebby system.

Well to answer the question, Farooq is perhaps the only guy on this unit and in this room about which we can say the most, how consistent a cricketer can be. We know what Farooq is — an elite route runner with a bit of juice. he has good get away speed off the line and is good at high jumps to catch the ball in the longer areas of the field. However, you would frequently observe him fail to hook the simplest of platys. That is precisely what Farooq is at the stage of his career. Fortunately, the positive aspects are much more extensive than the negative ones.

You have Anderson who is the big, strong, 6’4” receiver going into his sophomore season, who appears to be on the rise very fast as far as development is concerned. His height and quickness turn him into the red zone and end zone receiver that Arnold and the Sooners should be able to count on. That part of the offence has to be good or the Sooners will not compete with the best SEC has to offer. I believe that is were Anderson fits in. He could be the player who achieves a superlative performance in the next year 2024.

The bright spot of Sooners is their wide receivers perhaps because they have enough numbers for this position. Actually, they have two other guys on the bench who, although not starters, are capable of becoming top receivers at other schools of, for instance, the ACC or any other league.

Among all the wide receivers, Andrel Anthony might be the fastest, and we will get to witness that in the 2024 season. Discuss Jayden Gibson, a deep threat that the Sooners will also have lined up for end zone plays, given that the player stands 6’5”.

They do, it is just a matter of how they employ such rights. This wide receiver room could be really, really good.