Player: Clinton Anokwuru
Position: Defensive End
Height / Weight: 6-4/235
High School: Fort Bend Bush (Richmond, TX)
Offers: Alcorn State, Army, Liberty, Louisiana, Louisiana Tech, Navy, North Texas, SMU, Texas Southern, Texas Tech, Wyoming
Recruiting Services: Rivals 5.5 | 24/7 Sports N/A | ESPN
Video: Hudl
Cumulative Ranking: 83.33
Commitment Date: June 20, 2019
Texas Tech received their fourth commitment for the 2020 class in defensive end / tight end Clinton Anokwuru.
Burden lifted‼️#Ŧ20 #WreckEm #GunsUp 🔴⚫️🔴👆🏾 pic.twitter.com/Fa8Rwg4jpr
— Mr Skywalker🕺🏾 (@igboboy_clinton) June 21, 2019
So I find this pretty fascinating. Anokwuru has mostly tight end highlights and maybe one or two defensive highlights. On defense Anokwuru is playing defensive tackle, so he’s out of position if he’s going to play defensive end, which given his size defensive end or tight end seems about right.
On the offensive side of the ball, most (if not all) of his highlights are him blocking, which given his athleticism and size, he dominates opponents. When a player commits, there’s usually some coordination, a heads-up. Anokwuru tweeted his commitment at 8:46 p.m. and head coach Matt Wells tweeted his “Wreck’Em” at 8:59 p.m. Additionally, none of the recruiting services have a pre-produced story about Anokwuru’s commitment. None of these are bad things. Anokwuru attended Texas Tech’s camp last weekend and earned an offer, his first Power Five offer. Anokwuru’s measurables aren’t listed, but you’d have to guess that the coaching staff gets all of that information tested when they attend camp. I’d also add that Matt Clare, who is by far one of the best guys to follow from a Houston (and really Texas) standpoint tweeted that Anokwuru is a defensive end. One last weird note is that it is very odd that Anokwuru hasn’t been rated by 24/7 and I’d bet that he gets a rating by the end of the day. They’re almost never the last service to rate a player (that’s almost always ESPN).
So maybe this is one of those things where maybe Anokwuru camped as a tight end, but the Texas Tech coaching staff thought that Anokwuru is going to grow into that 6-4/260 defensive end, the kind that Texas Tech never seems to develop. And if Anokwuru is a tight end, that’s not a problem. There’s always a place for an athlete that has Anokwuru’s measurables.