College Football

Brent Venables working on building Oklahoma football into a force, brick by brick

Updated Apr. 24, 2023 3:00 p.m. ET

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RJ Young

FOX Sports College Football Analyst

NORMAN, Okla. — Oklahoma's spring football game was in session, and Brent Venables stood there watching with his hands stuffed in the pocket of his gray hoodie.

He stood 8-10 yards behind the offense, staring down the axis of his center over the ball. Sometimes there was an assistant next to him, sometimes he was by himself. But he was decidedly understated, even sullen, belying the intensity which has been a hallmark of his coaching.

When the defense made a play, his feet were last to move. When the offense made a play, he waited for the officials to spot the ball, and then took a few steps forward. His posture was that of a man who was evaluating, measuring, taking in as much as he could.

This is not the Venables I'd spent the last 25 years watching coach ball. That man was more animated than a Pixar flick, taking place in a sea of fireworks, against a Jackson Pollock painting. That man was so over the line that he had his own personal get-back coach constantly tugging at his waistline lest an official throw a flag.

In his office at the Switzer Center, the windows overlook the south oval guarded by his best-known predecessors — Builder Bs — of Bennie Owens, Bud Wilkinson, Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops, the first man to ever make him a defensive coordinator.

And make no mistake, with a slight frame, chiseled jaw and an intensity I could hear coming out of the meeting room just three days before the spring game, he is still very much a man about the details.

He brings an hourglass to each meaning to illustrate just how little time they each have.

"I don't get to do this twice," Venables said. "This is a vapor in my life. I don't have a day to waste to get guys to have that fanatical sense of desperation to attack not only life but certainly their football careers."

He demands effort and abhors excuses. Down the hall from his office, minutes before our meeting, Venables let out, "If you have an excuse, I'd love to hear it." None was offered.

He looks to maximize every encounter, every moment, every day because he knows that's where games are won and where seasons are made.

"Whatever your best is," he said, "each and every player, each and every coach, both sides of the ball, all three phases are best, that should be our trademark. Our best should be our trademark."

Oklahoma's Brent Venables discusses the Sooners' last year in the Big 12 and the move to the SEC

Venables believes football is hard, and he wants it to be that way.

Last year was one of the hardest seasons he's ever endured as a full-time coach. Beginning his career as linebackers coach at Kansas State in 1996, he was part of a three-year run at K-State that saw the Wildcats go 31-6, including a Fiesta Bowl victory in 1997.

After joining Oklahoma for the first time in 1999, he became a household name. Championships, winning and outstanding defense became as much a calling card at OU as its Heisman Park and Barry Switzer's wishbone.

When he left Oklahoma in 2012 to become defensive coordinator at Clemson, not many believed the move would work. But Venables became part of a football team that won at least 10 games every season — until he became head coach at OU in 2021.

Then the unprecedented took place.

The Sooners finished below .500 at 6-7 in 2022, their worst performance since 1998 — when John Blake was head coach.

"Now, I've never been on a team that's been 6-7, and I don't like it in any way," he told me. "But I've got a clear vision on what we have got to do to improve that."

Now, with just one season left in a Big 12 Conference that will field 14 teams for the first and only time in its history, and sitting on the cusp of a move to the SEC, Venables' ability as a head coach will be tested.

"You fail your way to success," Venables told me. "A lot of people don't like that, but that's the truth of the matter. You have to get scarred up. You have to go through it so that you can get to where you want to go. And no matter how uncomfortable and sickening it makes you along the way, you learn through failure, being uncomfortable. That's where the real growth happens."

You'll hear these sorts of phrases often from Venables. 

Success is the worst teacher there is. Rehearse your beliefs. You can't practice soft and expect to play hard. How you do anything is how you do everything. Best is the standard.

Oklahoma Sooners coach Brent Venables describes his approach to the transfer portal

He is a man who has treated triumph and failure just the same, knowing each an impostor.

He is the first football coach who I saw coach the game the way so many of us — him, his players, me — live life: with equal parts fury, focus, volume and honor. I saw, for the first time, a football coach who takes the game as seriously as he takes the protection of his family.

There's a story Venables tells about one of his mother's boyfriends.

"In the summer after my freshman year," he said, "one of my mom's friends that I saw somewhere had mentioned to me that Jim hit my mom in front of some other people at a bar the night before. This was a Saturday evening, early evening, 5 or 6 o'clock. So I got into my buddy's car and we drove around until we found where Jim and my mom were, at a bar. I remember thinking that this was a moment that was way overdue. I remember telling myself in the car: ‘This is going to stop now. I'm big enough and old enough that I'm going to help my mom. I'm going to give her a way out.' I went into the bar and asked Jim if he put his hands on my mom. He said he did and asked me, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ So I beat him up in front of all his buddies. And that was pretty much the end of that relationship."

Venables has sought to give his players a way out for nearly three decades. Those he's coached have heard his passion, his pleading with them to do it right the first time, nail the details, trust him to know what's best for their futures.

Those players who have trusted him have won at least 11 games in a season once in their playing career, and every class since 2003 has won at least one conference title.

His approach looks akin to the one Stoops put in place for himself, that of last-word decision-making, surveying, and listening with the understanding that the head coach doesn't need to make every decision but that every decision is made with his philosophy at the heart of them.

The Oklahoma he inherited is not the one Lincoln Riley did. 

The roster was gutted of talent by the transfer portal, including half the 2021 Oklahoma staff and a future Heisman winner that followed Riley to USC. 

"You have to adjust, and you have to adapt to the environment, to the hand you're dealt," Venables said.

Venables also had to contend with the transfer portal, immediate eligibility being allowed following an initial transfer, and the advent of name, image and likeness laws and NIL collectives across the country — all items Riley didn't have to counter when Bob Stoops handed him the keys to a program that returned a Heisman finalist, almost no turnover to the coaching staff and no player to the portal because there wasn't yet one in 2018, let alone the idea that players could profit from their name, image and likeness.

Riley, unlike many, has adapted to the present college football landscape almost without pause. In a calendar year, Riley coached Oklahoma after it announced it would join Texas in a move to the SEC, and then coached USC as it announced it will join UCLA in a move to the Big Ten.

He flipped over the roster, found a way to create an 11-win team out of players who played college football elsewhere just months prior. In many respects, Riley's ability to build a winner in such a short amount of time in Los Angeles is as much about having learned alongside other head coaches what it takes to win with the tumultuous change the sport has seen over the past five years.

In many respects, Venables is building a roster as a head coach for the first time on principles he learned from Bill Snyder, Stoops and Dabo Swinney, who famously shunned the portal for the better part of two years before finally dipping in for the first time in a decade in 2020.

In one year, Venables has turned over 105 players, adding new faces to a place that he wants to feel as stable as a thousand-year-old oak tree. But that's difficult when your signings across incoming freshmen and transfers are 42 in Year 1 and 37 (and counting) in Year 2.

"When you sign in 42 and you're signing 37, you're building everywhere," he said. "There's no position or side of the ball that's immune to improving and progressing and building not only for the short term, but most importantly for the long term that has longevity and sustainability in a profession, in a sport, where that's hard to get. What I'm trying to build is something that is exactly that."

It's hard enough to find talented players who are culturally suitable to any program. It's still hard to find players who can adapt to the culture, to the new people, new customs, in a short amount of time that can lead to winning football games.

Venables is a man about grounding — himself, his players, his staff, fans of Oklahoma. His childhood was one where male figures came and went in his house and were sometimes violent toward his mother, but where his coaches were present, positive and protective.

Oklahoma's Brent Venables explains the changes he's made going into his second season as head coach

He's wanted to provide that for those in his purview from the moment he became a grad assistant, insistent on not joining the nomadic ranks of coaches who caravan their families across the country in pursuit of better or more high-paying jobs.

That meant passing on every head coaching vacancy offered to him for more than 20 years until Oklahoma called him and asked him to come back to Norman. When he accepted the job, he was greeted on the tarmac by a fan base that has not only grown used to the kind of consistency he himself seeks — with just three head coaches in Norman since 1998 — but that has grown used to winning.

With Venables, they lay claim to one of the most respected and admired assistant coaches in the sport. But he's not an assistant anymore, and he's facing a challenge he hasn't met yet in what will be a defining year not just for his career but for the future of Oklahoma football.

"This will be my 15th year in Norman, Oklahoma," Venables said. There's nobody that has a clearer understanding of what the expectations and what the standards are here. There's all different kinds of ways to get there, and my job is to recreate that."

Brick by brick, player by player, coach by coach, Venables is building for victory. Lord help those who bet against him in the state where the college team in Norman is the pro team everywhere else.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The Number One College Football Show." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young and subscribe to "The Number One College Football Show" on YouTube.

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