HAPPY DAYS
High school athletes announce their college choices
NORMAN — Their personalities are quite a bit different.
“Yeah, he can be a pain in the butt sometimes and I can be more easy to get along with but he’s a good dude.” Isaac Stoops said of his twin brother, Drake.
Drake isn’t going to argue too much.
“I might be the troublemaker, honestly,” Drake said. “But he’s the one that before games I’ll forget socks or I’ll forget an undershirt and he will have packed extra. And he’s done that since seventh grade just because I’m like that. He always has my back.”
Despite their differences, though, and the insistence that they treat their college decisions as individual choices rather than a collective one, both affirmed their commitments to become preferred walk-ons at the University of Oklahoma during a ceremony at Norman North on Wednesday.
Drake is a receiver and Isaac played both cornerback and receiver for the Timberwolves.
Their father tried to blend in both before the ceremony and after, though the face of Oklahoma football for nearly two decades doesn’t exactly get to fall into the shadows in Norman.
Wednesday was a different kind of signing day for Bob Stoops.
For the last 30-plus years, Stoops has spent the first Wednesday in February as a college football coach, the last 19 as the head coach at Oklahoma.
But Wednesday morning, in his first signing day since retiring from coaching last summer, Stoops was almost just another parent in the crowd, sitting on the front row — his wife Carol a row behind him — as he watched his sons go through the ceremony.
Afterward, he took a series of photos with his
family and chatted easily with those around him, free of having to worry about finishing off a recruiting class and waiting anxiously for letters of intent to roll in.
That’s Lincoln Riley’s job now.
Both Stoops twins had a chance to go off on their own and in a place where their father’s legacy wouldn’t be such a part of the football program.
But both — independently — decided that they didn’t want to run from that and, eventually, decided to play
together instead of splitting up for college.
“I’ve always watched what 80,000 people looks like, seeing what Power Five football looks like at a high level, a successful level,” Drake said. “I definitely considered all the schools that offered me and considered some other schools preferred walking on at and I made sure to check them out before committing to OU, but I think this is just where my heart was at.”
Oklahoma has a history of regularly making use of walk-ons in major roles.
In addition to Baker Mayfield’s rise from twotime walk-on to Heisman Trophy winner, the starting center for much of the last two seasons — Erik Wren — started off as a walk-on, while fullback Jaxon Uhles also was a walk-on before earning a scholarship.
Sooners coach Lincoln Riley could not speak about the twins by name — coaches can’t comment on players until they’ve either signed (walk-ons don’t officially sign) or they’re on campus. But Riley said the preferred walk-on program was an important piece of the recruiting puzzle.
“We understand the quality of players that you can get there,” Riley said. “That was something that our staff decided we really needed to put great effort into and I think we’ve got a really strong class of guys coming in that could have played football a lot of places and these are all guys that are going to have a chance to impact our program in a lot of different areas in the future.”