Meet Oklahoma RB commit DeZephen Walker, for whom carrying the rock is "just natural"

DeZephen Walker was born on August 8, 2008.

8/8/08, at 8 pounds and 8 ounces.

Maybe it was the serendipitous nature of all those eights. But regardless, in Tiffany Walker’s recollection, her husband Demetrios told her — then and there — that their son was destined for greatness.

It didn’t take long for her to come to the same realization. Granted, DeZephen has NFL bloodlines, as Demetrios spent time with the Kansas City Chiefs in the early 2000’s. But he played defensive end. When DeZephen began playing football, he immediately gravitated to two different positions: linebacker and running back. He wasn’t going to spend his football career chasing down quarterbacks and clogging run lanes like his father did. Yet although running back eventually became DeZephen’s primary position, Tiffany’s favorite memory of her son’s football career occurred while he was on the other side of the ball.

“When he was in middle school, they were in the playoffs, and Z’s on defense,” Tiffany recalled proudly. “Basically, they’re tied, and the other team has the ball, and [their guy] is running toward the end zone. If he scores, they win — it’s one of those moments. So Z just goes and hawks this guys down and makes him cough up the ball, and the crowd goes wild. That’s one of my favorite memories.”

Years later, DeZephen is still sending crowds into a frenzy on a regular basis. These days, though, those crowds are a bit larger — and they’ll grow exponentially come 2026. Walker will play his senior year of high school football this fall at Raymore-Peculiar (Mo.) High, and then he’ll enroll in January at the University of Oklahoma.

Nature vs. nurture

If you turn on Walker’s highlight tape, one thing that’s immediately evident is that he’s a very instinctual runner. He’s seemingly got a sixth sense — a sort of internal GPS that steers him north, south, east or west, through traffic and into the open field.

“I’m not going to lie — it’s natural,” Walker laughed. “I’ve been doing it since I was young. I’ve always had an instinct. I’ve been a running back since I started playing football. It just came natural.”

And it’s not just the instinct that makes him a tremendous prospect. At 5-foot-11 and 205 pounds, Walker has a college-ready frame and plenty of top-end speed, as evidenced by his 100-meter dash time of 10.9 seconds. He owns the requisite skill set to be a three-down commodity at the collegiate level, and he models his game after a pair of backs that became three-down commodities at the professional level.

“It’s a couple guys,” he said. “I’ve always been a fan of Marshawn Lynch. Right now, I’ve really been trying to get that Jahmyr Gibbs type of elusiveness and speed. So I would say those two backs are what I look up to.”

And in order to maintain his muscle mass while continually building additional burst and twitch, Walker relies on his father. During the offseason, Demetrios and DeZephen maintain a demanding regimen that balances weightlifting with agility and speed training.

“Most times, I work out with my dad,” Walker explained. “We’ll go to an open field, do ladder drills, footwork drills, run up the hill, run with a sled, resistance training. We do a lot of that stuff. We’ll go to Planet Fitness, work on abs, curls — everything you can imagine. Full-body workouts. We’ll do it three, four times a week. We did that for a couple months, took a month off, and football workouts is already here.”

The genesis of a monster

If you listened to Walker talk about his early days at Raymore-Peculiar, you’d figure he was probably a late bloomer, a guy who didn’t pick up recruiting attention until the waning stages of his high school career. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

“I would say coming in as a freshman, I was definitely underdeveloped,” Walker remarked. “There’s a big difference from middle school to high school, varsity, 6A — hardest conference in Missouri. So I would say I’ve grown mentally and physically, learning the plays and concepts and getting adapted to that type of speed of play that varsity football has in Missouri.”

He’s being modest, which is perfectly in line with his character. Walker, “underdeveloped” as he may have been, earned a role in the Panthers’ varsity backfield as a freshman. And by the end of the year, he held offers from some of the most prestigious schools in the country. Kansas State pulled the trigger first, which made sense given the proximity factor. But Walker’s second offer was Georgia, which was working on a second consecutive national championship season at the time. Tennessee offered too, then Oregon, then Missouri and Arkansas and Nebraska and Wisconsin.

Not bad for a kid that acknowledges his game was pretty one-dimensional at the time.

“I feel like coming in as a freshman, before that, I was only a running back,” he observed. “I didn’t really catch that many passes. But I developed into a receiving back as well. [Now] they’re starting to put me in the slot, something that I’m definitely going to have to do at the next level. And I’ll say I’ve also evolved with my blocking as well. But other than that, I feel like I’m the same explosive running back — just a little bigger now.”

Walker’s holding steady at 205 pounds right now, and should be in line for an enormous senior year in terms of production. Ray-Pec made waves this offseason in hiring new head coach Greg Jones, who served as a defensive assistant on Dan Lanning’s inaugural staff at Oregon in 2022. Prior to his stint in the collegiate ranks, Jones spent sixteen seasons as a high school head coach in the Kansas City area. And as he takes over at Ray-Pec, Jones and his staff have made it clear that their offense is going to lean heavily on its bell-cow back in Walker.

From Peculiar to the Palace

Walker didn’t even have an offer from Oklahoma two months ago. His recruitment, at least as far as the Sooners’ involvement, was over in lightning-quick fashion. When Jim Nagy and the OU staff called him in early May to extend him a scholarship, it piqued his interest. He wasn’t intimately familiar with Oklahoma, but knew its reputation as a factory for NFL’ers.

“I’ve always watched Jalen Hurts, Kyler Murray, those guys,” Walker remarked. “I was a big fan of Joe Mixon; I used to watch his highlights all the time when he was at Oklahoma. I know they have a successful history of winning and championships. So I wasn’t always a deep fan of Oklahoma, but I’ve always been a fan of the players and the NFL talent they have.”

At the time, Walker was focusing on four schools: Nebraska, Notre Dame, Kansas and Kansas State. But just days after he earned the OU offer, Notre Dame took a second RB commit in the 2026 class. Walker was no longer a necessity in South Bend. So he cancelled his June 13 official visit with the Irish and replaced it with a trip to Oklahoma, which would mark his first-ever taste of Norman. With the Sooners replacing Notre Dame in Walker’s top four, each of the frontrunners sat within a five-hour radius of the Walkers’ home in Missouri. Tiffany insists the local flair in her son’s list of finalists wasn’t by design, but it was a fortunate twist of fate for a mother that loves to sit in the stands and watch her son play.

“We wanted him to be where he felt comfortable,” she maintained. “At the end of the day, I don’t think that was a huge factor. If he wanted to be close to home, we wanted him to go somewhere close to home. But if he wanted to be further away, we would support that too.”

Many considered Nebraska to be the odds-on favorite for Walker’s commitment going into official visit season. He was scheduled to travel to Lincoln on June 20, and that would be his final OV. Things seemed to be aligning nicely for the Huskers… until Oklahoma crashed the party.

When Walker arrived on campus, he clicked immediately with his player-host, freshman RB Tory Blaylock. And in a stroke of fortuitous coincidence, Demetrios realized that he’d played with Tory’s father Derrick in Kansas City some two decades ago. From a relational standpoint, the weekend was off to a roaring start. And the realm of relationships is one in which Oklahoma’s staff thrives.

“Everyone was very welcoming; I know it’s kind of their job to do that on an official visit,” Tiffany laughed. “But there was definitely something that was very real about it — not only welcoming, but you could kind of see the culture. What I mean by that is, you can kind of tell how the other staff interact with the staff. Just kind of watching those types of interactions from a distance, being around a couple of the players as well and having staff answer all our questions fully, that was really big.”

Walker says that throughout the visit, there wasn’t a precise moment that he knew he’d be committing to Oklahoma. In fact, at the outset, it wasn’t even a consideration.

“You know, coming in, I didn’t have [committing] in my mind,” he said. “Because I’ve never done it; I’ve always looked at the school and came home and talked to my family and all that. But just seeing everything, I knew it was the perfect place for me. SEC? Can’t get better than that. That’s when I knew I had to make my decision.”

And fortunately, when Walker broached the idea of shutting down his recruitment and pledging to the Sooners, his parents were fully on board. On Sunday, towards the end of the official visit, the family conferred and emerged with a unanimous verdict: Oklahoma was the right fit for Walker.

“Myself, his dad, we all weighed in,” Tiffany explained. “We went in with our three principles: culture, coaching and winning. And that’s kind of how we evaluated all the schools. And if other things came into play, we would add that or subtract that. But that was the biggest thing. We huddled together and weighed all the positives, the negatives, basically everything about it. Like I said — culture, coaching and winning, and where he wanted to be. So we all came together, and that’s how the decision was made.”

“I think I’ll be ready”

With the weight of a life-altering decision off his shoulders, Walker’s eager to enjoy his last few months of just being a kid. Yes, he’ll spend Friday nights toting the rock this fall for the Panthers. And yes, there will be many early-morning weight-room sessions and sweltering afternoon practices in the Midwest heat. But there will be lax periods in his schedule.

“Usually I just play video games or I hang out with my friends,” he chuckled. “Here and there, we’ll go do something. But I’m more of a chill type of guy; I don’t really go out that much. I play Marvel Rivals, Call of Duty… I stopped playing Fortnite. But Madden, NCAA, those are my top games… I listen to NBA Youngboy, Bossman DLow, and I be turning on some DMX. Tupac. Just a lot of rappers. I would say my favorite movie is Real Steel. You ever seen Real Steel? It’s like a robot boxing movie. It’s real cool.”

He’s got six more months to relish the “chill” in his life. There won’t be much of it when he enrolls at Oklahoma in January, at which point the work will begin in earnest as Walker competes for an immediate role in the Sooners’ running back committee.

For the moment, he’s the lone RB commit in Oklahoma’s class, and he’ll still be 17 years old when he kicks off his first fall camp at OU. He’s going to be the Doogie Howser of the running back room. But he’s eager to embrace that challenge.

“You know, I feel like just getting used to waking up early every day on my own and going to classes, that’s something I’m going to have to experience to get used to it,” he mused. “But every other aspect, I feel like I’m ready, and that’s why I decided to enroll early. I think I’ll be ready.”

And though Mom wasn’t going to stand in her son’s way if he chose a program hundreds of miles from home, she’s quite grateful that she’ll be able to make the elementary trips down to Norman to see him suit up on Saturdays.

“Just being able to watch him play — to watch him play early, contribute, and continue to develop into an amazing player… I don’t take anything for granted,” Tiffany expressed. “This has been wonderful to see him in all the stages of his development. Every experience, just being present as a mom, being able to take everything in — I don’t take anything for granted.”

“We’re coming back”

The chance to play SEC football was a major selling point for Walker, who remarked after his commitment that he knew he was “an SEC running back.” Part and parcel of the SEC brand is the mantra that’s become virtually synonymous with the conference itself: It Just Means More. And for Walker, he can’t wait to see how much more it means on Saturdays.

He’s only ever seen an empty Owen Field. But he has every intention of returning to campus on Sept. 6 when the Sooners host Michigan in primetime. On that night, he’ll surely bear witness — for the first time — to a glorious crimson-clad crowd of 84,000 strong.

“Man, I’m excited,” Walker laughed. “I definitely want to see the stadium and the atmosphere and the energy, because I’ve never been to an Oklahoma game. But I’m sure the energy is crazy. So I’m definitely ready to see Oklahoma versus Michigan. That’s the game I want to go to.”

And like so many of his peers in the Sooners’ 2026 recruiting class, Walker isn’t deterred by the tumultuous 6-7 season that Oklahoma endured last fall. He’s a firm believer that under Brent Venables, the Sooners will return to national prominence. And he’s chomping at the bit to be part of that resurgence.

“I feel like we’re definitely going to be a top contending team, at least for the SEC championship,” he proclaimed. “We got a good defense returning, a lot of young guys, and our recruiting class is starting to get even better. We just got a quarterback commit [Bowe Bentley]. So I’m really looking forward to what Oklahoma football does, and what we have to show everybody in the SEC. We’re coming back.”