Brent Venables: Our competitive depth will lead to better finishes
By Chip Rouse
Three hours into the second day of Big 12 Football Media Days interviews with the coaches, it was finally Oklahoma football headmaster Brent Venables’ turn before the media, the final act in the annual two-day preseason gathering at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
Last year, we fell well below our expectations and standards at Oklahoma, but we learned and grew a lot as a football program, Venables said in his opening comments to the assembled media.
“We’ve looked long and hard in the offseason at what we need to do to become a more efficient football team,” Venables said. “We’ve looked at every single part of our program and how we can get better.”
Every year, it’s a new team with new players and new opportunities. Nothing ever stays the same, the OU head coach said.
Venables likes to refer to his 2023 Oklahoma team as Team 129, in reference to this being the 129th season of OU football. Out of the 123 players on the roster of Team 129, he said, 97 are either in their first or second year at the University of Oklahoma.
“I really love the competitive depth we’ve developed with our current players, our returning players and what we’ve recruited, both out of high school with 40 new scholarship players and 17 transfers,” Venables explained.
The second-year Sooner head coach said he really believed that with the improved competitive depth Oklahoma will have stronger fourth-quarter output on both sides of the ball, where the Sooners performed very poorly last year. As an example, the Sooners scored 132 points in the first quarter last season, but just 75 in the fourth quarter.
How much you expect the defense to improve?
Venables was asked the inevitable question of how he planned to improve upon a defense that ranked 122 out of 131 teams last season. “We haven’t been good on defense for a long time,” he said, “but everywhere I’ve been it’s been a rebuilding process to some degree.
“Scoring defense. That’s where it starts, keeping people out of the end zone, becoming a better red-zone defense, stopping people. I believe we’ll be better because of the returning experience.
“We’ll be better fundamentally, we’ll be better aggressiveness, better with our timing, our precision and our physicality,” Venables said.
OSU head coach Mike Gundy says Bedlam is dead and OU is the reason. Do you agree?
The Oklahoma head coach also was asked about the comments made the day before by Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy, now the dean of Big 12 football coaches, who declared Bedlam was doomed the moment Oklahoma elected to leave the Big 12 Conference.
“Look, I’m not in control of whether or not we play Oklahoma State. Whether or not be play them in the future, nobody is asking me what I think,” the OU head coach said.
“If they do ask me, I’ll tell them what I think. I love college football. I love the traditions of the game. I love rivalry games. I’d love to play the game.
“But we’re going to play the schedule they put in front of us.”
In closing, Venables was asked if Bob Stoops had reminded him how the Sooners did in Stoops’ second year on the job. “I’ve got good revisionist memory,” Venables responded. “I remember what that year was like (Venables was on Stoops staff then as co-defensive coordinator).
“You learn a lot through failure, it teaches you a lot,” he said. “But if you’re made of the right stuff, winners respond, winners come back a better version of themselves, winners go right back at it, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”