Oklahoma football: CBS Sports ranks Brent Venables 12th out of 14 Big 12 head coaches
By Chip Rouse
Since the 2000 Oklahoma football national championship season, OU head coaches — and there have only been three of them — have generally ranked high whether the measure was success on the field or salary an,d whether the scope of ranking was conference-based or broader.
Last week, CBS Sports published a ranking of all the head coaches of Power Five teams ahead of the 2023 season. The top three coaches on the list are hardly a surprise. Nick Saban of Alabama was at the top of the list followed by Kirby Smart of two-time defending national champion Georgia and Dabo Swinney of Clemson.
Close you eyes and ears Sooner fans. Lincoln Riley at USC was No. 4 and Jim Harbaugh at Michigan was No. 5. You can check out the rest of the top 25 by clicking here.
Four coaches out of the Big 12 — Sonny Dykes (TCU), Chris Klieman (Kansas State), Mike Gundy (Oklahoma State) and Lance Leipold (Kansas) — ranked in the top 25.
Oklahoma’s Brent Venables didn’t fare very well. He ranked 12th out of the 14 Big 12 coaches for 2023, which is probably fair and reasonable given the hard truths of his head-coaching debut. Only Scott Satterfield, who is in his first season at Cincinnati after six seasons at Appalachian State and four at Louisville, and Neal Brown at West Virginia rank lower than Venables in the Big 12.
Venables ranked 12th in the Big 12 and 52nd nationally. That’s down seven spots from where CBS Sports ranked him among Power Five head coaches ahead of the 2022 season.
This admittedly biased observer, however, believes Venables won’t stay down for long. He’s too good a coach with too much pride and discipline. And he does know football, and he knows how to recruit the right people. It then falls on the assistant coaches he has retained or brought in to develop that young talent into the best it can be.
The sample size isn’t very big, given that this will only be Venables’ second season as a head coach, but it was big enough, with a six-win season and a losing record at an historically successful college program, to cast plenty of doubt on whether Venables may be better suited as a coordinator and not so much as a head coach.
That, of course, is a judgement perhaps better made after more than just one season. Expectations are always going to be high for a program like Oklahoma, and no one knows that better than Venables himself, who clearly knows what success looks like, having been at OU before and then at Clemson. The question now is does he have what it takes to achieve it as the guy calling all the shots and making the tough decisions.
We are about to find out, but it may take a year or two more to reap the full reward. At the very least we will have much more data with which to pass judgement.