Blatant Homerism: It's the offensive line, stupid
(Note: If you need context for the headline.)
I hate to say I told you so, but… Here is what I wrote in June when Oklahoma announced it had reached a contract extension with head coach Brent Venables:
Progress isn’t linear and all that. The 2024 season has the potential to be a rocky one for OU.
The Sooners are shifting to a conference in which they will face six teams this season that recruit in the top 20 in the nation. (Another opponent, Missouri, ranks 21st.) Preseason point spreads already peg them as underdogs in five games and small favorites in two others. They’re playing that schedule with a green quarterback and a revamped offensive line that was neglected by the last head coach for too long.
Add it all up, and the win-loss record might not look too pretty at the end of the year.
Four months later, the aforementioned QB, Jackson Arnold, has been benched, while the transfer-laden OL has been an injury-plagued mess. On top of that, the team’s five best wide receivers are missing in action. The variables that OU needed to break the right way to have a successful season didn’t, and a crippling run of bad luck made the overall situation immensely worse.
I’m not bringing this up now as a way to paint myself as some genius or psychic. At the time, I was simply postulating that OU extended Venables in large part because a season like this one was on the table. That new contract signified a commitment to how Venables is reshaping the football program for the future, even if things went sideways in 2024.
As for the here and now, Andy Staples of On3 rightly pointed out in a column this week that the offensive line is hamstringing OU on the field. Nothing revelatory there. While Staples is correct that OL coach Bill Bedenbaugh – and, by extension, Venables – made decisions in recent years that exacerbated the situation, he’s underselling the role former head coach Lincoln Riley played in setting the OL on this path.
In retrospect, Riley’s personnel management consigned OU to a transfer-heavy approach to fielding an OL. He allocated two scholarships to OLs in the 2021 recruiting class. In 2022, Riley skipped town for USC days before recruits signed letters of intent, leaving Venables and his staff holding the bag with a recruiting class that again consisted of just two linemen.
Consequently, Bedenbaugh and Venables had no choice but to stock the OL room with transfers to fill the holes in those two recruiting classes. For all the hype around how the transfer portal is changing college football, it’s not overflowing with high-caliber OLs. When you have to shift from using transfers to fill in gaps to relying on them as the cornerstones of the unit, you’re rolling the dice. Witness what is taking place on Saturdays this year for OU.
But the recruiting situation is improving. OU has five true freshmen OLs on campus now, including blue-chip prospects Eugene Brooks and Eddy Pierre-Louis, who will find themselves in line to contribute next year. Instead of needing five OLs from the transfer portal for 2025, the Sooners may only need two or three. Meanwhile, the four OL commitments in OU’s ‘25 recruiting class include five-star Michael Faususi and Ryan Fodje.
In other words, Venables and Bedenbaugh seem to be addressing whatever mistakes they made that contributed to this year’s disaster.
Clearly, the ‘24 team has questions beyond the OL that demand answers for the future. Does OU have its quarterback on campus now, or will the Sooners go transfer shopping in the offseason? More importantly, is it time to clean house of the coaches on the offensive side of the ball, or do they deserve a pass for dealing with many problems beyond their control?
We have six more games’ worth of data to compile before those decisions get made. Whatever happens, rebuilding the OL should remain the Sooners’ top priority.