GOOD NEWS: Another Key Oklahoma Defender Announces His Plan to Return in 2025

Oklahoma’s success on defense in 2025 might be measured best not by who came through the transfer portal, but by who didn’t leave.

The Sooners got some more good news on that front on Friday when Kendel Dolby announced he intends to return to Norman for his senior year.

Dolby, a senior from Springfield, OH, who signed with the Sooners in December 2022 as a junior college transfer from Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, played in all 13 games in 2023 but only appeared in three games in 2024 before suffering a severe ankle dislocation and fracture in the SEC opener against Tennessee.

The 5-foot-11, 185-pound Dolby came to OU as a slot cornerback but eventually began to take more and more snaps as Brent Venables’ cheetah linebacker, where coaches put his aggressive ball-hawking and elite instincts to good use.

He got three starts in 2023 and had broken into the starting lineup this season when he went down. Dolby played 36 snaps against Temple and 54 against Houston but didn’t play against Tulane. In the Week 4 loss to the Vols, Dolby got just 17 snaps before going down in a tangle near the Tennessee goal line. He finished the year with 10 tackles and a quarterback sack to go with one QB hurry and one pass defensed.

“My heart breaks for him,” Venables said after Dolby’s injury. “He’ll be fine, he’ll recover and he’ll continue to have an opportunity to play this game a long time. But he’s a guy that I’ve been bragging on for several months, for obvious reasons, and just hate that is a part of the game. You hate that for him.”

As a junior last season, Dolby totaled 49 tackles, five tackles for loss, two sacks, two interceptions and four passes defensed.

Dolby’s return comes on the heels of announcements by defensive tackle Damonic Williams, linebacker Kip Lewis, safety Robert Spears-Jennings and defensive end R Mason Thomas that they would be coming back to OU in 2024 (Thomas’ return was announced on social media by OU’s NIL collective and was quickly deleted, although it’s widely presumed he’ll make the announcement official soon on his own social media channels).

That core group, with the expected returns of middle linebacker Kobie McKinzie, cheetah linebacker Sammy Omosigho, safety Peyton Bowen, cornerback Eli Bowen, defensive tackle Jayden Jackson, cornerback Jacobe Johnson, linebacker Jaren Kanak and defensive linemen David Stone and P.J. Adebawore, among others, gives Venables and his new defensive coordinator an experienced, dynamic foundation upon which to build the Sooner defense in 2025 and beyond.