Brent Venables, Oklahoma’s new AD face the SEC’s hardest questions together

Brent Venables showed up to SEC spring meetings in May wearing a neck brace. He had just undergone fusion surgery on four vertebrae in his neck, the surest sign that decades of damage from his playing and coaching days had caught up to him.

Two months later, the Oklahoma coach walks into SEC media days in Tampa in the strongest position he’s held since taking the job. Venables led the Sooners back to the College Football Playoff last season after a 6-7 debut in the league nearly cost him his job, and he did it by taking over defensive play-calling himself when he didn’t trust anyone else to do it in a season that demanded results.

“What my options were is name somebody else that’s maybe a first-time play caller in a season that really — I mean, there’s a lot of expectations. And so, nobody should be able to stand out front better than me. And it’s a place that’s very comfortable for me,” Venables said.

He transformed the Sooners’ defense into the SEC’s most punishing and dominant force last fall, and it needed to be because the offense unexpectedly fell off a cliff late last season. Now the Sooners are standing out front, a contender in the SEC and seemingly back on their feet just a year after many wondered whether Venables was the right man for the job. He enters his fifth season as the opening act at SEC Media Days this week. 

Now the question he must answer: can Oklahoma do more after a 10-win season?

The Sooners made the playoff last year on the strength of a defense that allowed 15.5 points per game and created the kind of chaos plays that papered over an offense that couldn’t move the ball consistently against good teams. A 71-yard fumble return made the difference in a six-point win over Tennessee. An 87-yard pick-6 separated them from Alabama by two in the regular season.

The offense was a different story. Quarterback John Mateer suffered a thumb injury that fundamentally changed what Oklahoma could do just four games into the season. “He had a hard time just squeezing a ball,” Venables said. “One of the things you’ve got to be able to do.”

When he returned, he looked different. He threw as many touchdowns as interceptions (eight) in the final eight games, and ran for only 241 yards and three touchdowns after piling up 190 yards and five scores in the first four games. The quarterback who could take over a game with his arm and feet was a changed man because of the hand injury.

Meanwhile, the running attack was a disaster. Coveted Cal transfer Jadyn Ott toted the ball only 21 times for 68 yards in seven games, and the Sooners were among the nation’s worst, averaging only 188.5 yards per game to rank 113th.

And the Sooners still made the playoff. Venables’ defense — and his decision to call the plays himself — is the reason.

But Venables knows that won’t be enough again.

“Overall, we’ve got to be a more aggressive, physical, offensive unit running the football,” he said. “It starts with mentality. You look at fundamentals, how you coach it, how you teach it, how you correct it, what you emphasize. I want to see people physically running off the football, just like I want to see a defense getting off the rock. I watch the game with that lens.”

The case for optimism is straightforward: Mateer is healthy, and he spent the offseason correcting his throwing motion, which was more side-arm than over the top, which resulted in several tipped passes last season. The offensive line that struggled a year ago was young, but returns several starters plus E’Marion Harris, the starting right tackle from Arkansas. The nine first-year starters from last season are now second- and third-year players with SEC experience. Leading wide receiver Isaiah Sategna III — “as impactful as any player we had,” Venables said — is back alongside transfers Trell Harris from Virginia and Parker Livingstone from Texas.

Livingstone, the former roommate of Longhorns quarterback Arch Manning, was Texas’ third-leading receiver (565 yards) last season. “If it was all said and done, he’d still be a Texas Longhorn,” Venables said. “But today’s new, modern college football created him an opportunity to start his career somewhere else.”

The roster theory Venables is operating on is specific. He doesn’t believe the top 20% of his roster separates Oklahoma from anyone. He doesn’t think the bottom of the roster does either. “The middle half of the roster, to me, that’s where there can be a potential separation,” he said. “I felt like last year we had a really good middle half of our roster, and we’ll see how fast we can take that middle half of the roster and elevate it (this season).”

If that middle class takes a step, the Sooners have a chance. They’ll need it. They travel to Michigan in Week 2, then to Georgia two weeks later to start SEC play, followed by the Red River Rivalry against Texas after a bye week. Three games in the first five weeks against projected top-15 opponents, including the defending SEC champion and one of the favorites to win the SEC title.

Venables, new AD on the same page

If last season was the start of a new era for Oklahoma football in the SEC, this fall is the introduction of a whole new world behind the scenes in Norman. Athletics director Joe Castiglione, a fixture there since 1998, retired in the spring. Oklahoma hired a guy who’d never been an AD before, who’d never known a world without NIL, and who spent his first public appearance telling a room full of reporters that the business model everyone is operating under might not survive.

Roger Denny is a corporate tax attorney from Illinois who entered college athletics five years ago, eight days after NIL pay was approved across college sports. He has never known the sport any other way. Oklahoma hired him because of his expertise in labor law, private equity, and mergers and acquisitions. 

Unlike his predecessor, and many of the current ADs across the SEC who came up through the old system, Denny says the quiet parts out loud.

“Right now, the long-term things are our short-term issues,” he said in May. On the question of rising roster costs, he was direct: “Certainly at Oklahoma, we were really fortunate to have the support that we have from our fan base and our donors. But that’s certainly something we’re all thinking about — just how much longer we can go with these rates.”

While college and conference leaders spend most of their hours campaigning for legislation in Washington, D.C., to codify elements of the House v. NCAA settlement and offering antitrust protections for a system that has routinely been challenged in court since 2020, Denny is open to other options.

“When you’re talking about antitrust law, there are two routes to solve that issue,” he said. “Legislation. Collective bargaining.”

He noted the SCORE Act’s collapse in June and acknowledged cautious optimism around the Protect College Sports Act, which could reach a vote on the Senate Floor later this month. But his position was clear: the only enforceable path to cost certainty, absent a bill that actually passes, runs through collective bargaining. “We owe it to ourselves and our industry to continue to pursue a parallel path,” he said. “And the only other parallel out there is the CBO.”

Athletic directors and coaches across the country seek unity from the top down within their programs, from the university president to the athletic director to the coach. The thread connecting Denny and Venables is sustainability. Neither pretends the current model works.

Venables referenced the NFL and said he wants parity and constraints, rather than the current system that allows blue-blood programs to utilize an NIL budget that doubles that of others in the same conference. “I know it’s not sustainable as it is now,” he said. “Whatever Oklahoma’s problems are, they probably pale in comparison to a lot of other programs, and I don’t like that for college football.”

In a world led by the Big Ten and SEC’s billion-dollar media deals, Denny warned that being richer is not necessarily better. Removing spending caps without governance would erode the competitive balance that drives media deals that fund everyone’s budgets. “You’ve got to be real careful. By doing that, you eliminate some of the parity in the system that’s driving the media values that builds a significant chunk of all of our budgets,” he said.

Venables and Denny arrived at the same conclusion from entirely different directions. Venables, armed with one of the top front offices in college football, took it upon himself to fix the on-field issues a year ago by taking over defensive play-calling. Denny is using his off-field experience to guide one of the nation’s top athletic departments into a new, uncertain future. 

“He just gets it,” said Venables. “It’s like he’s been in a locker room his whole life. He’s got a real simplicity to him about how he sees things. He’s 10 steps ahead when it comes to a lot of things that you need.”

Denny was equally emphatic about Venables. “To think that a new AD coming in creates any sort of hesitation around Brent — that couldn’t be farther from the truth,” he said. “We’re really behind Coach Venables.”

If Oklahoma’s offense catches up to Venables’ defense, the Sooners are a legitimate SEC contender with a coach and an AD aligned on where the program and the sport need to go.