Report: Brent Venables to take $1 million pay cut for 2025 season

Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables is taking a $1 million pay cut for the 2025 season, according to documents obtained by USA Today’s Steve Berkowitz. His salary will be $7.55 million this year.

Speaking with USA Today, an Oklahoma spokesperson said the decision – which Venables “initiated” – is a one-time contribution toward the school’s revenue-sharing efforts. Schools can now directly share up to $20.5 million with athletes following House v. NCAA settlement, with the majority of those dollars expected to go toward football.

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Venables is not the only FBS coach to divert dollars from his salary toward rev-share. Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy saw his salary get reduced by $1 million to help with rev-share, and Florida State coach Mike Norvell reportedly is planning to contribute $4.5 million of his salary toward those efforts in Tallahassee.

“It was initiated by Coach Venables as a one-time give-back to contribute to the department’s revenue-sharing efforts,” the spokesperson said to USA Today.

Speaking with SoonerScoop’s George Stoia III Friday, OU AD Joe Castiglione praised Brent Venables for approaching the athletics department in February about giving back a portion of his salary. It showed not only how he is as a leader, but also his commitment to success at OU.

“It really shows a lot of leadership on Brent’s part,” Castiglione said. “He came forward with the idea, knowing there were needs for our program. He wanted to help. He recognized the need to retain players already on our roster and those we needed to recruit, and he wanted to help participate in the revenue-sharing formula going forward.”

How schools are approaching revenue-sharing

Oklahoma is planning to split the revenue among six sports, Joe Castiglione previously confirmed. Football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball, softball and gymnastics are all set to participate in rev-share this year.

While Oklahoma has not confirmed its specific allocations for rev-share, the widespread expectation is football will receive 75% of the funds at most schools. Men’s basketball would get 15%, women’s basketball would get 5% and 5% would go to any remaining sports.

For football in particular, data compiled by Opendorse showed SEC teams are expected to divert 15.9% of the the sport’s rev-share dollars toward wide receiver and 15.5% toward defensive linemen. Quarterbacks in the conference would get 15.1%, which is the second-lowest allocation of the Power Four.

Additionally, according to Opendorse, the majority of college football players – 66.5% – are getting less than $10,000 from rev-share. In fact, only 0.9% of players receive more than $500,000 from revenue-sharing dollars.