Oklahoma football: What was OU’s best defensive team this century?
By Chip Rouse
Erratic to poor defensive play has been the ball and chain of the Oklahoma football program for most of the past decade, and it hit record new depths in Brent Venables’ first season as the Sooners’ head coach.
The irony in that, of course, is that Venables is considered one of the best defensive minds in college football. No one truly expects Oklahoma’s defense to stay like this much longer, but it’s also safe to say no one ever expected that it would be as bad for as long as it has.
Believe it or not, in the early part of the 2000s, under another first-time head coach, Bob Stoops, himself a defensive-minded coach, Oklahoma had one of the best defensive teams in college football.
An offense that scored more than 35 points a game complemented by a defense that allowed 20 points fewer than that combined to win a lot of games for the Sooners in the opening years of this century and sent Oklahoma to four BCS national championship games.
Five times in the opening decade of the 2000s, the Oklahoma defense finished in the top-10 nationally in total defense and twice in the top five. Between 2000, the year OU was a perfect 13-0 and won the school’s seventh national championship in football, and 2005, the Oklahoma defense allowed opponents an average of 15.4 points a game.
Venables was a part of those Oklahoma defenses in the early 2000s as co-defensive coordinator, and there is every reason to believe he can get the Sooners back there again, given the right players in the right spots and in the right system. That was a big reason Stoops and OU athletic director Joe Castiglione wanted to lure Venables away from the top defensive job at Clemson and bring him back to Norman.
Oklahoma’s best defensive team this century was probably in 2003, when the Sooners ranked No. 3 in the nation in total defense, allowing just 260 yards and 15.3 points per contest. That season, OU ranked No. 2 in the nation against the pass, allowing 146 yards per game, and 20th in defending the run game (113 yards per game).
Two years before that, in 2001, the year after the national championship season, the OU defense yielded just 263 yards and 13.8 points per game, which ranked fourth-best among NCAA Division I teams.
Between 2000 and 2011, while Venables was serving as co-defensive coordinator and defensive coordinator, Oklahoma allowed over 300 yards of total defense just four times in 13 seasons. By contrast, over the last five seasons (2018-22), the Sooners have given up an average of 402 yards per game on defense, with a high of 461 yards last season. Only nine other FBS teams allowed more yards per game in defense in the 2022 season than OU.
This is why a number of college football experts believe that if Oklahoma, with all the offensive weapons it wielded, had been better on defense in 2017, 2018 and 2019, when the Sooners made three straight appearances in the College Football Playoff, they might have been displaying a couple more national championship trophies by now.
This is also why Brent Venables not only believes, but is absolutely resolute, that if Oklahoma can get better on defense they can win 10-plus games in 2023 and compete for a conference championship and perhaps higher.
Time will soon tell, but there is no mistaken that defense is the roadblock that has Oklahoma headed down the wrong road. Past time for a course correction.