Building the 2016 Oklahoma Sooners Roster from Scratch
I spent an afternoon last week trying to reconstruct the Oklahoma Sooners Football Roster 2016 Season Breakdown From Top Recruits To Final Roster Cuts from three different recruiting sites, a couple of depth chart archives, and some game film notes, and honestly it was worse than I remembered. The problem isn't that the information doesn't exist — it's that it's spread across six different platforms with conflicting class rankings, and the roster sizes shift depending on whether you're counting scholarship holders, walk-ons, or redshirt freshmen who showed up to fall camp. I ended up just building a master spreadsheet and cross-referencing everything, which saved me from going completely insane. The 2016 recruiting class was a clear step down from the banner years surrounding it. Bob Stoops and his staff brought in what was essentially a three-star-ish class on paper, ranked somewhere in the mid-30s nationally by most services. That's not an insult — it just reflects the reality that Oklahoma's recruiting had dipped after the 2013 and 2014 cycles. The class included Dede Westbrook, a four-star wide receiver from Tampa who became one of the more impactful immediate contributors. Marcell Asberry was another solid addition at linebacker out of Texas. The running back room got Marquise Jackson, and the defensive line picked up a few younger bodies who would fill out the rotation. What people often miss when looking at this class is that Oklahoma's 2016 roster wasn't built primarily on new faces. It was built on continuity from the 2015 team that went 12-1 and won the Rose Bowl, with a handful of key departures and the gradual integration of the newer guys. Baker Mayfield hadn't arrived yet — that's a critical detail that separates this roster from everything that came after. Kedren Thompson and Justice Hansen were the primary quarterbacks coming out of spring, and the whole offensive identity reflected a more traditional Oklahoma spread offense with Jordan Scarlett and Alex Ross handling most of the backfield work.
Who Actually Made the Cut
The final roster heading into the season had roughly 110 to 115 scholarship players, depending on how you count. Here's how the major position groups looked after the first round of cuts: Kedren Thompson was the starter coming out of spring, with Justice Hansen as his primary backup. Brandon Weeden was gone, and Sam Bradford had long since moved on. The QB room was small and unproven, which turned out to be a problem later in the season when injuries and inconsistency forced the coaching staff to look elsewhere. This is exactly the kind of roster situation that makes a breakdown like this interesting — the depth chart you see in August is not the depth chart you see in November. Jordan Scarlett was the workhorse, and he was a five-star recruit from the previous cycle. Alex Ross provided speed and pass-catching ability. Marquise Jackson, a four-star signee from this class, was part of the rotation but didn't dominate touches as a true freshman. The backfield was deeper than the passing game, which is a fairly common Oklahoma pattern. Scarlett ended up being one of the few genuine stars on this roster, and his presence made the overall unit look better than it actually was.
Dede Westbrook arrived as the centerpiece of the 2016 class and immediately slotted into a significant role. He was listed at six-foot-three, which is unusually tall for a Sooner wideout, and that created some confusion early on about whether he was a slot guy or a outside receiver. He played both. Other names in the group included James Washington, who was actually a 2015 recruit, and a handful of younger bodies competing for the third and fourth receiver spots. The receiving corps had flash but not a lot of consistency, which became a major storyline by the middle of the season. This was one of the more stable parts of the roster. Tackles like Daryl Jackson and guard Tyler Smith (a five-star recruit who eventually transferred) were in the mix, though the line as a whole struggled with run blocking more than pass protection. The 2016 Oklahoma offensive line was competent but not dominant, and that's a detail most recap articles gloss over. They held up well enough for a passing game that didn't have a legitimate NFL quarterback, which is its own kind of achievement. Marcus Smith was the anchor at defensive end, a senior leader who had been recruiting as a five-star back in high school. Adonai Delmas played tackle, and the defensive front had decent size but not a ton of proven playmakers. This is where the 2016 class actually showed some promise — the younger defensive linemen brought in that cycle started to fill rotation spots, even if they weren't yet game-changers.
Get the Full Details
Marcell Asberry and a few other newcomers began to slot in here, alongside returning veterans. The linebacker group was one of the more functional units on the roster, partly because the scheme allowed them to play without having to cover a massive amount of ground. Oklahoma's defense under Stoops has always leaned toward gap-control linebackers rather than range-covering ones, and this roster reflected that philosophy. The secondary was the weakest point of the entire roster, and everybody who watched the games knew it. Cornerbacks were undersized, safeties got burned off repeated play-action, and the pass rush couldn't create enough pressure to make up for it. This is the part of a roster breakdown that matters most when you're trying to understand why a team went 7-5 in 2016. The defense gave up too many big plays, and the personnel simply wasn't built to stop modern spread offenses at the SEC level. Here's something that nearly every casual fan misses when they look at a recruiting class and assume it translates directly to on-field production: Oklahoma's 2016 class had roughly 25 to 30 signed recruits, but only about eight or nine of them saw meaningful regular-season snaps as true freshmen. The rest either redshirted, got cut during fall camp, or were on the fringes of the roster for the entire year. Dede Westbrook and Marquise Jackson were the exceptions, not the rule. Most of the four-stars from that cycle were still developing and wouldn't become full contributors until 2017 or 2018.
I ran into a specific problem when I was compiling the data — several of the 2016 recruits had their recruiting rankings changed between 247Sports, Rivals, and ESPN, which meant the same player showed up as a three-star on one site and a four-star on another. This made it nearly impossible to give a clean "top recruits" summary without picking a single composite ranking system. I ended up using the 247Sports composite because it's the most widely referenced, but I flagged the discrepancies in my notes. If you're doing this kind of breakdown yourself, I'd recommend doing the same.
Roster Cuts and Redshirts
Final roster cuts in college football are not dramatic events. Nobody gets announced publicly. Players either make the travel squad, get redshirted, or leave the program entirely. In Oklahoma's case, a handful of 2016 recruits were redshirted as true freshmen — that's standard procedure for most of them, especially the offensive and defensive linemen who needed time to adjust to the speed of the college game. Others simply didn't fit the depth chart and transferred out or were released during the spring of 2017. The most notable departures from the 2016 roster after the season included a few underclassmen declaring for the NFL Draft and a small number of walk-ons who didn't receive scholarship offers for the following year. Jordan Scarlett was the only major NFL prospect to leave early, and he took the place of a running back who had been a reliable producer for three seasons. That kind of attrition is normal, but it also explains why the 2017 roster looked so different despite the coaching staff staying mostly the same.
What This Roster Told Us
The 2016 Oklahoma Sooners went 7-5, which is a perfectly adequate season but one that exposed the gap between the program's historical standards and its actual talent level at the time. The roster was thin at quarterback, vulnerable in the secondary, and lacked the big-play defensive players that had made previous Stoops teams dangerous. The 2016 recruiting class wasn't bad — it was just average, and average classes don't produce average seasons at a program like Oklahoma. The counter-intuitive thing about this roster is that the weak points weren't obvious until you started watching film. On paper, the offensive line and running back rooms looked fine. The linebacker group had good size. It was the secondary and the quarterback position that really unraveled, and neither of those showed up clearly in a recruiting ranking sheet. If you're building a roster breakdown like this for analysis purposes, I'd suggest spending more time on the positions that actually matter for game outcomes rather than just listing the top recruits by star rating. That approach gives you a much more accurate picture of what happened that season. I wish I could tell you there's a clean download or a single source that has the complete Oklahoma Sooners Football Roster 2016 Season Breakdown From Top Recruits To Final Roster Cuts in one place, but there isn't. The best approach is to pull the official roster from the NCAA or Oklahoma's athletics site, cross-reference it with recruiting archives, and then verify positions and class years against game-by-game participation data. It takes about two to three hours if you're thorough, and less than an hour if you're willing to accept some ambiguity on the borderline roster spots. Either way, you'll end up with a much better understanding of that season than you would from reading a single recap article.
