Oklahoma football: Brent Venables’ 6-year, $43.5M contract fully guaranteed

Brent Venables’ six-year, $43.5 million contract that pays him an average of $7.25 million annually is one of the largest ever awarded to a first-year head coach and we now know that it is fully guaranteed.

It was previously announced that Venables will make $7 million in the first year of his contract. That would place him in the top 15 of all college head coaches.

By comparison, Lincoln Riley made $1.5 million as offensive coordinator at OU. When he was promoted to succeed Bob Stoops ahead of the 2017 season, Riley’s annual compensation was increased to $3.1 million. His final season at Oklahoma in 2021, Riley was making $7.7 annually, fifth most of among college football head coaches, according to the USA Today data base. Stoops was making around $5.6 million annually when he stepped down after the 2016 season.

Given the terms and details in Venables’ contract, which we have learned much more about in the past couple of weeks after an open-records request to the university reported on by several media outlets, including The Oklahoman and The Athletic, it doesn’t appear that OU is expecting Venables to be around for a while…a long while.

The deal Oklahoma has with Venables is unusual for a first-time college head coach, but like most is loaded with incentives.

According to reports, Venables’ annual base salary is $375,000 plus personal services compensation of $6,075,000 in the first year. The contract calls for a $100,000 increase every year beginning in 2023. The personal services compensation is paid from “unrestricted private funds and/or outside athletics-related income.

Venables will receive a $100,000 bonus if Oklahoma reaches the conference championship game and an additional $50,000 if the Sooners win it. Here are some of the additional bonus payouts Venables would be entitled to:

• He will receive $25,000 for OU’s participation in a non-College Football Playoff bowl game.
• He will get $100,000 for playing in a New Year’s Six bowl outside of a CFP semifinal.
• If Oklahoma makes one of the CFP semifinal games, Venables will receive $250,000 and another $50,000 if the Sooners advance to the championship game.
• The ultimate incentive, of course, would be winning the national championship, for which Venables would receive a bonus of $400,000.
• Venables also will receive $75,000 if he is named national coach of the year and $35,000 for being named conference coach of the year.
• Should the cumulative grade-point average of the football team be 3.0 or higher for any semester, Venables will receive a bonus of $25,000 annually.