Brent Venables just exposed how broken Oklahoma football really was under Lincoln Riley

Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables just revealed some damning details about the state of OU football under Lincoln Riley before Venables took over.

During his first weekly press conference of the 2025 season on Tuesday, Venables, while reminiscing at how far the Sooners have come heading into his fourth year, at least off the field, said during his first season in 2022 that OU had a team GPA of 2.2 and “a lot of guys that didn’t pass drug tests. A lot.”

Sooners had poor GPA and failed drug tests in Venables' first season

Venables left as Clemson’s defensive coordinator to return to Norman as OU’s head coach after the 2021 season, when Riley left in the middle of the night to USC to avoid a looming move to the SEC. Although Venables didn’t throw Riley under the bus, it’s obvious who was in charge and allowed all that chaos to unfold off the field before Venables arrived and started correcting it.

“We had a lot to work through,” Venables said. “I chose not to ask anyone to leave when I first got here. Let me give everybody a fair shot and just kind of see where we’re at. Through time, some players chose to leave, some players just weren’t fitting the bill when it came to going to class and living right off the field. As a football program, we had a lot of issues the first year.”

For comparison, during the Spring 2024 semester, OU had a 3.03 team GPA, the program's highest-ever cumulative GPA. The Sooners have compiled a team GPA better than 3.0 for six straight semesters now.

The numbers fans notice the most are wins and losses, though. The Sooners went 6-7 last year for Venables’ second losing season in three years at the helm. However, as Venables reshapes the culture of the Sooners post-Riley, that will soon hopefully translate into more success on the field, as well.

“That’s not taking a shot at anybody,” Venables said. “I’m grateful for the players that were here and helped us kind of get to this point. But the bottom line is, we had to start completely over in many ways. And it’s been a lot of fun, too. You don’t sit back and celebrate it. There’s no badge of honor with it. It’s getting closer to what we want, but not where we want it to be yet.”

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