Brent Venables on joining the SEC: 'We're running towards the SEC'

The first day of July also marks the first day that Texas and Oklahoma officially join the SEC, move that’s been in the works for quite some time and represented the first domino to fall in nationwide conference realignment in college athletics.

The Sooners’ football program has been diligently preparing for this transition since news broke in 2021 that they’d be moving on from the Big 12 Conference. And during Paul Finebaum’s visit to Norman on Monday, Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables spoke on how the Sooners have been preparing for the SEC along with the program’s overall mindset.

“This year is obviously incredibly important,” Venables admitted. “We’ve worked really hard the last couple of years to prepare for this moment. But what’s sitting in front of us right now is trying to put together the best roster that we can and have these guys as well prepared as we can.”

“You’re going to figure out a lot, you’re going to learn a lot through this transition. But this isn’t as much about where we’re going as who we’re going in with, and it’s not as much about proving people wrong because we are trying to prove each other right,” Venables explained. “And we worked really, really hard though with both our programming, and our roster, the vision of our program for both the short term and the long term to what we need to do to transition to the SEC.”

Despite worrying about a more rigorous schedule in a new conference that will regularly feature some of the top programs in the country, Venables and the Sooners are keeping the attention on themselves and how they can continue growing following a 10–3 season that represented a step in the right direction. But Venables is also aware of the new challenges that his team will face on Saturday’s week in and week out.

“But incredibly exciting, this will be the most unforgiving league there is in America and that goes without saying,” Venables said. “This is a league that is really, really hard top to bottom and the margin for error is very small. So it’s thin air if you will, but that’s what this program has been about for a long time.”

“We’re running towards the SEC and with great expectations and excitement, and again, this will be a launching point for this program moving forward.”

There isn’t a team in college football that has more conference titles than the Oklahoma Sooners. Which will make it fascinating to see if they can maintain that success in the short and long term as the program looks to stay dominant in the SEC.