Oklahoma football: Sooners must learn how to win all over again

Oklahoma football won 11 games nearly every year in the 23 years of the Bob Stoops/Lincoln Riley coaching era. But the Sooners won just six times in Brent Venables first season as head coach.

That’s a sharp drop off and one that is not acceptable within the proud and passionate world of Sooner football that has been spoiled by success.

Four losses by no more than three points in the final five games of the 2022 season doesn’t assuage the wounds created by a 6-7 season. A win is a win and, conversely, a loss is a loss, and the brutal fact of the matter is Oklahoma not only didn’t contest for a conference championship, but it experienced its first losing season and worst in terms of losses in nearly a quarter-century, or since 1998.

We all know that things will eventually get better. They have to because in the unhumble view of Sooner fans, they can’t get much worse.

Enough said about what’s in the past. What does it look like marching forward? During the offseason, Venables has looked over his shoulder at what took place last fall, he’s looked in the mirror at where things sit presently and he’s looked forward at what’s ahead where things are going, and he likes what he sees.

“You fail your way to success,” Venables believes. “The most successful people, the great achievers, fail their way to the top,” he said to reporters recently after one of the OU spring practice sessions. “A lot of people don’t like that, but that’s the truth of the matter.”

Unlike the transition from Stoops to Riley, when the former handed the latter a championship-level team that was ready to rumble and superior in talent to the rest of the Big 12, the same cannot be said for what Venables inherited after the departure of Riley.

Between players entering the transfer portal and a couple of top players Riley took with him to his new destination, including this year’s Heisman winner, Caleb Williams, the cupboard was left pretty bare. Plus, when Riley succeeded Stoops, there was little continuity lost from a coaching and system transition.

None of this is offered as an excuse for Oklahoma losing more games than they won in Year 1 of the Venables era at OU, but it clearly was an exacerbating and contributing factor.

The Sooners are losing some key players on both sides of the ball to the NFL Draft and as undrafted free agents, but they also have an outstanding 2023 recruiting class coming in and some big additions through the transfer portal to help mitigate and even over time improve upon the losses.

This is still a very young Oklahoma team. Only 20 or so scholarship players remain from the 2021 Sooner team that finished 11-2 and defeated a 15th-ranked Oregon team in the Alamo Bowl. And just 11 players remain on the roster that won OU’s last Big 12 championship in 2020.

The good news, though, is that the players who were on the roster last season and return this year now have a year’s experience in the Sooners’ new offensive and defensive systems, and there was a lot of learning to be gained from last season’s disappointments.

"“You have to get scarred up. You have to go through it so you can get to where you want to go,” Venables said.“And no matter how uncomfortable and sickening it makes you feel along the way, you learn through failure, being uncomfortable. That’s where the real growth begins.”"

No one would argue with that viewpoint on its face. But the real proof will come on the field this fall. The real question is how much growth can we realistically expect from the 2023 Oklahoma team?

We’ve gotten a glimpse, although somewhat artificially, at what the 2023 Sooners could look like from the spring game. The conditions and design of that game, however, do not really translate to real game conditions or real opponents, given that you are basically scrimmaging against yourself.

Venables liked what he saw from the Sooners the way they finished out a very difficult and disappointing 2023 season. The difference between winning and losing is often a very, very small margin for error. OU was on the wrong side of that more often than not in the 2022 season.

But what Venables, his coaches and even Sooner fans saw in the last four or five games last season was a group, in Venables’ words, that “took a punch and continued to fight, believed and played for one another. Played with great pride.”

It’s a new season and a new team with new faces and a new attitude on what it takes to win. And with a favorable schedule, Oklahoma football fans are expecting more from the Crimson and Cream in 2023.