Oklahoma Sooners coaches just can't stop talking about true freshman wide receiver Elijah Thomas

Sooners coaches rave about true freshman wide receiver Elijah Thomas

It’s not often that you get a four-star receiver in your recruiting class, and he ends up looking like a guy who has played four years of college football already. Thomas has come in and been amazing. Now, granted, he hasn’t played a snap of SEC football yet.

But even so, he’s garnering comparisons to former top-five picks in the NFL Draft by his teammates, and his coaches continue to be in awe of him.

“I tell you what, we were talking about him a couple of months ago in the room with the rest of the receivers,” WR coach Emmett Jones started. “And you know, Javonnie’s [Gibson] background, he’s a Louisiana kid. He was talking Louisiana — ‘I train with Malik Nabers [New York Giants wide receiver] all summer, Coach, and that’s [another] Malik Nabers right there.’ He’s just so explosive, learns fast, takes good notes, and never really makes the same mistake. 

“We put a lot of pressure on him to see how he’ll respond. He’s been responding well. I try to break him on the field; I try to break him in the classroom. I can’t break him at all. He’s got natural ball skills, and his catch range is ridiculous, man. I’ll tell you, he caught a screen the other day, man — and he probably went 80 yards in about three seconds. Just a freak of nature [who] gets better every day.”

Before even seeing the 2025 recruiting class on campus, no one thought Thomas would be a guy who got legit snaps in 2025. Look at the wide receiver room they have, with guys who are all talented and established, so Thomas getting snaps would be difficult.

At least, that’s what we initially thought. Now, it seems inevitable that he has a legit role in this offense. When you look at everything that Thomas does and his skill set, it’s going to be impossible to keep him off the field.

“He’s got great, strong hands, tremendous length, body control, timing,” Brent Venables said. “His instincts show up; some of his defensive instincts show up. At the end of the day, he’s a confident, physically mature guy who’s done a lot of hard work with great humility. A lot of young guys haven’t had a lot of failure, if you will. And it certainly hasn’t been perfect. But he’s received hard, tough coaching. The pressure of the moments that you got to show up every day, something’s on the line, he’s shown up every day.”

Thomas has the makings to be the next Jeremiah Smith, but maybe not to the level that Smith is, mostly because I’m not sure it’s fair to put those kinds of expectations on him. But what I mean by that is, the freshman wide receiver could easily become a very good wide receiver, one of the best in the country, early in his career, similar to Smith.

By year two, we could be talking about Thomas as a guy who’s looking like a first-round draft pick as soon as he’s eligible.