Texas football trending away from 4-Star Colton Vasek on decision day

Among the more anticipated decisions for any local blue-chip target of the 2023 Texas football recruiting class is coming up to start off the month of August. The highly touted four-star local product and Austin-Westlake edge rusher Colton Vasek is set to announce his commitment on Aug. 1, specifically at 3 p.m. CT.

Vasek took to social media on the night of July 31 to announce his commitment date for Aug. 1 at 3 p.m. CT. And this comes just after he took a couple of unofficial visits to Austin and Norman to see the Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners late last week and into the weekend.

This decision from Vasek comes at a time when he is trending pretty firmly to Oklahoma over the likes of Texas and the Oregon Ducks. While it was presumed that Texas and Oregon were the top two schools heading into this pair of unofficial visits last week, Oklahoma is clearly making a significant charge at the moment.

https://twitter.com/OUCrystalBall/status/1553926642162098176

In the last couple of days, there were two expert 247Sports Crystal Ball Predictions projecting Vasek’s commitment to Oklahoma.

Key 4-Star Texas football EDGE target Colton Vasek trending OU on decision day

And that was just the beginning of the forecasts coming in over the weekend projecting Vasek to land with the Sooners over the Longhorns and Ducks.

Around a half-dozen analysts and publishers in the Rivals FutureCast also unanimously projected Vasek’s commitment to Oklahoma in the last 48 hours or so. That even included a handful of analysts/publishers from the Texas Rivals site Orangebloods.

To top it all off, each of the three forecasts from On3 analysts/recruiting reporters peg Vasek to choose the Sooners. That also includes the On3 recruiting prediction machine now favoring Vasek to Oklahoma with odds greater than 95 percent. For much of the summer, the On3 RPM for Vasek had him as a Texas lean.

It’s also worth mentioning that each of these forecasts from the major recruiting services came with a pretty high level of confidence that Oklahoma will land Vasek.

The writing is definitely on the wall that Oklahoma has emerged as the favorite in the race to land a commitment from Vasek early this week. This means that Texas will probably need to turn its focus elsewhere to address the edge rusher need in the 2023 class.

It also heightens the importance of Texas landing the highly touted four-star Marlin (TX) edge rusher/linebacker Derion Gullette and/or four-star Friendswood edge rusher Braylan Shelby in the near future. And it looks like both Gullette and Shelby are closing in on decisions within in the next few weeks.

Texas currently holds commitments from 20 recruits in the 2023 class, 14 of which are blue-chips. At the moment, the lone edge rusher commit in the Longhorns 2023 class is the former Oklahoma State Cowboys pledge and three-star South Oak Cliff product Billy Walton.