Setting expectations for the Oklahoma Sooners in 2024
It’s May, and in the college football world that means it’s time for arbitrary lists like ranking head coaches. The crew at CBS Sports recently took a crack at slotting the 68 college football coaches in the Power Four conferences. With Oklahoma improving from 6-7 in his first season to 10-3 last year, Brent Venables climbed 18 spots to 34 overall.
It’s easy to see how the typical college football pundits would reach such a consensus as a matter of simple difference splitting. If Venables was coaching at a school like Boston College, that type of trajectory would vault him higher on the list. But he’s coaching a program where 16-10 over two years qualifies as a disappointment.
Frankly, the only rating of Venables that really matters is how he’s handling the job he was tasked with. My view of that project has changed dramatically in the last two years. It also complicates matters for the upcoming season.
Venables inherited a more dire situation in Norman than most people realized at the time of his hire, myself included. I’ve tried to drive that point home lately as we’ve accumulated more data illustrating the lingering effects of Lincoln Riley’s tenure as the chief executive of OU football.
Riley’s tactical genius as an offensive coach, which served OU very well in the short run, set the stage for the long-run problems the program is now trying to overcome. Riley excelled at developing effective solutions on the fly for the Sooners offense. Aided by top-tier quarterback play, he built offenses capable of moving the ball so efficiently that his teams won lots of games, captured Big 12 titles and earned College Football Playoff bids.
It’s an impressive feat to retool your offense in a matter of months to suit the skills of a quarterback like Jalen Hurts, who was essentially sent to the scrap heap by Nick Saban at Alabama. But even though Riley could improvise with the best of them, he seemed to lack a vision of what OU football should look like in years to come. Riley’s fondness for plug-and-play transfers and the deterioration in OU’s evaluations and development make sense in that context: When coaches center so much of their energy on adapting from year to year, they invariably neglect the foundational aspects of managing a program.
So Venables took over an organization that had become overly reliant on one coach’s ingenuity by that coach’s own design. Riley operated like an inventor constantly creating something new out of whatever parts he could get his hands on. Venables is attempting to transform OU football back into a machine – to be inspected and tweaked periodically for peak performance.
So how should we grade Venables’ performance through two seasons, and what does it mean for the future?
We could start with OU’s record. Six wins in year one didn’t cut it, but improving by four games from 2022 to 2023 qualifies as forward progress.
You could chalk up some of that shinier record to the Big 12 falling off last season. More objective measures suggest it went beyond just diluted competition, though. Brian Fremeau’s FEI metrics, Bill Connelly’s SP+ ratings system and Rob Bowron’s Beta Rank numbers all adjust for opponents. Each shows OU improving in ‘23 from ‘22. In fact, they all point to the Sooners recovering to something closer to their historical standards last year.
Importantly, OU’s gains in defensive efficiency appear material. The Sooners seem to be returning to form on offense, too – doing so without Heisman Trophy winners at quarterback and an abundance of talent around them at the skill positions. Venables should also get his due for bringing on a well-regarded special teams coach in Doug Deakin from San Diego State to help clean up OU’s sloppiness in that phase of the game.
As for personnel management and talent acquisition, high school recruiting hasn’t missed a beat in the transition between coaching staffs. Returns through three classes suggest the Sooners even improved in that department, especially considering the influx of standout defenders who are signing with OU. At the same time, the inherited players leaving for other schools are generally finding homes with programs that would be considered a clear step down – if not multiple steps – from Oklahoma.
All of this is to say that so far, Venables seems to be getting the big, important things right. The results are tangible through two seasons. That makes using the right criteria to evaluate Venables in 2024 extremely important.
Spoiler alert: OU almost certainly won’t roll through its inaugural SEC schedule. The league office gave the Sooners an in-conference slate that looks brutally difficult, including six opponents that rank in SP+’s top 16 teams in the preseason. Notably, OU is playing four toss-up games on the road, with trips to Auburn, Missouri, Ole Miss and LSU. Tall order.
Despite all the good done by Venables and his staff in overhauling the program, OU probably isn’t ready to do more than survive that kind of schedule. If you don’t believe me, oddsmakers believe the Sooners are more likely to win seven games this year than eight, let alone 10 or 11.
In the event OU does lose five or six games this fall, you can assume that the people who make those lists of coach rankings will have Venables on the hot seat heading into 2025. I’d maintain what’s more important than the team’s record in that scenario is how the Sooners play. The program could make significant strides this season and arrive at a disappointing record all the same. If you can accept that, you can judge what happens on the field in ‘24 with clearer eyes.