Sooners Got a 'Creature' in 2021 Defensive Back Jordan Mukes

A late bloomer in football – and on social media – OU's newest verbal commit looks like a star defensive back in the making

When Choctaw High School’s football season ended last fall, Jordan Mukes’ coaches called him into their office. It seemed the young defensive back had something important he had to work on.

“Jordan,” said head coach Jake Corbin, “you need to start a Twitter account.”

“I didn’t even understand what they were talking about,” Mukes told SI Sooners on Tuesday. “Like, ‘What do you mean?’ ”

Corbin wasn’t asking his rising star to spread his wings and become a social butterfly. The Yellowjacket coaching staff didn’t need Mukes to broaden his brand or become a social media influencer.

“ ‘So you can be recruited,’ ” Corbin told him.

“I was so confused,” Mukes said. “How am I gonna get myself out there on Twitter? They were like, ‘Make a Twitter.’

His bio says he started Twitter in July 2019, but his first original tweet was a fire emoji on Nov. 14, a Choctaw hype video he retweeted. Two days later, he posted his junior year highlights.

“He didn’t have any social media or anything like that,” Corbin told SI Sooners. “He was real hesitant about it. He’s not on social media. He’s not a real, ‘Look at me’ kind of kid. He doesn’t need to do that stuff.”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. On Monday night, Mukes used his Twitter account to announce that he had given a verbal commitment to play at Oklahoma in 2021.

“So he actually did it in my office with my assistant coach, Terence Carter, and we’re walking him through it – ‘OK, now put this picture on there,’ all that kind of stuff,” Corbin said. “He had no highlights. We made his HUDL highlights for him after the season. He hadn’t made any. All that kind of stuff. So all this is very new to him and maybe a little bit strange for him.”

“When I made it,” he said, “I didn’t have, like, no followers.

Now, Mukes has 1,557 Twitter followers, he’s tweeted 127 times, and he’s fairly active on social media. Most of his feed is recruiting-related.

He said it’s helped remove Corbin as the middle man. Now, coaches reach out to him — or, they did before he committed to OU.

Mukes said he wants “to go there and do what I know I can do” in 2021, whether that’s as a cornerback, a safety or even outside linebacker.

“Jordan’s kind of a novelty as a 6-foot-4 corner that’s not stiff,” Corbin said. “Jordan can move and bend and do all those things like you want from a smaller guy, but can do it at a larger size. I think he opens himself up to, with his size and potential size, being versatile. You get a lot more bang for your buck with Jordan.

“There’s no telling where he’ll end up. He’s physical enough to play a linebacker spot, either inside or outside, and he’s fast enough to play safety or corner. He lends himself to being able to do a variety of positions, and I think the sky’s the limit with him and his body as he continues to become a man.”

Corbin said 18 months ago, Mukes might have weighed 150 pounds. He played last season around 170. Now he’s closer to 205.

“And he has zero body fat,” Corbin said. “I mean, the kid is just as shredded as can be. He’s a specimen, for sure.”

The secret: Corbin said Mukes has gotten real, real serious about football. That meant a lot of time in the weight room, but there were other factors as well.

“Kind of hit puberty a little bit late,” Corbin said. “Didn’t have any hair on his face, that kind of stuff, and now he just looks like an NFL player. It happened all of a sudden.”

And it’s been nothing but good weight. As he’s added muscle, Mukes has gotten faster and more explosive.

“Usually they say weight will slow you down, but it actually made me move better,” Mukes said. “I don’t know. Just, my body was super athletic and I could just put on weight. It made me feel more comfortable.”

“He’s freaky athletic,” Corbin said. “I mean, he’s probably the most explosive kid I’ve ever coached, and that includes being at Union and BA and those places. He can just absolutely go when he does.”

Mukes also wanted to clear up a misconception that the 2019 season was his first in organized football. It wasn’t. It has been widely reported that he’d never played before last year, and he’s not sure exactly how that got started.

“I’ve always played football, from (when) I was 4 until I was 12, and I broke my arm,” he said. “And then I played my sophomore year, but I wasn’t a varsity guy.”

After breaking his arm, Mukes stepped away from football for three years and turned to basketball.

“Most definitely,” he said. “I was a hooper. I thought I was cold. Because I could dunk in like eighth grade. So I thought I was cold.”

When Corbin arrived at Choctaw, Mukes was a freshman on the basketball team. The next year, he went out for football, but it wasn’t what he thought it would be.

“Like, they would put me in a varsity game but they would take me right out,” he said. “Like, I wouldn’t say I was where I am right now, because I didn’t take my sophomore year seriously. I kind of was just OK with staying behind everybody. I didn’t really take it as serious as I needed to.

“Plus, I wasn’t really playing corner. They were moving me to outside linebacker and d-end and all this other stuff. … I’m like, ‘I’m skinny and I’m long; why am I playing d-end and outside linebacker?’

“So (2019) was my first year playing corner, but it wasn’t my first year playing football.”

Cornerback is where Mukes would like to play at OU, but Corbin said he sees him getting as big as 230 pounds.

“I love playing corner,” Mukes said. “I most definitely want to do that. But I’m OK with playing safety. Especially if at OU, we get the athletes that I know we can get.”

Mukes still plays basketball — Sooner fans will want to watch his numerous and spectacular highlight dunks — but apparently, he’s cold enough at football now.

“He was still kind of a basketball player playing football,” Corbin said. “Whereas towards the end of his sophomore year going into his junior year, he kind of flipped that and became real physical and just attacked the weight room and those kind of things, and now obviously he sees himself as a football player that plays basketball.”

Being a late bloomer might have made it tricky for Lincoln Riley, Alex Grinch and the OU coaching staff to go all in on recruiting Mukes, but they did. Mukes said his first scholarship offer came from North Texas, but his first Division I contact came from Oklahoma when the only thing anyone saw was potential.

“OU did a phenomenal job, in my opinion,” Corbin said. “They’ve been on him since Day 1. They’ve been on him since before he even had an offer. I actually commend them for trusting their own evaluation and their own eyes being able to see an athlete.”

Mukes’ emergence during his junior season made it easier for Grinch to be certain about the potential he thought he saw. Still, no games in junior high, a sophomore year not being serious and playing JV, and the notion of basketball coming first might have scared off a lot of coaching staffs.

Not OU.

Big-time recruiting can be like birds sitting on a wire. Everyone is pretty much static until one bird hops off, then everybody flies away at once.

“The business is so much monkey see, monkey do, where someone won’t offer until someone else offers, those kind of things,” Corbin said. “I always said, if I was ever in that position, if you know what you’re looking for and you see it, go ahead and hit it. A lot of guys don’t do that, but I commend OU for doing that and believing your own eyes and trusting what you see.

“And right now, everyone else has, too. Even before OU offered, Missouri, Texas Tech, Kansas State, etc., etc. – Florida State was really close. Who knows how long it would have kept going if he wouldn’t have committed last night? But OU’s seen him since the beginning and they’ve been on him since the beginning, and they’ve been true to him and stayed in contact and did everything the right way, and I think that’s what made him fall in love with OU.”

Corbin has been telling big-time programs about Mukes for a while now, but only recently did they return the interest.

“He’d text multiple coaches and tell them to like, hurry up and look at me before it was too late, a lot of stuff like that,” Mukes said. “And then it was crazy to have some of the coaches that he texted like, a year ago or two years ago, they actually tried to talk to me and they wanted to offer me and stuff. They definitely kind of looked off each other and they all kind of followed.”

Maybe they decided to get serious after Mukes got his Twitter account. Or hey, maybe they saw him with their own eyes.

“I assure you, he was on schedule to have just an absolutely unbelievable spring,” Corbin said. “I mean, he looks like a creature right now: 6-4, 200 pounds, zero body fat, looks like he’s been lifting like an absolute animal. You know, he just looks like an FBS-Power 5 kid walking around. So I would think he would have just absolutely blown up. I think it would have happened one way or another, but if we were to have just our normal spring, he would have had about every offer in the country."

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