Brent Venables' challenge in Norman
The Sooners have a lot to figure out for their future.
Even immediately after the Bedlam loss it all seemed relatively straightforward. Develop raw but wildly talented Caleb Williams into a skilled, well-rounded quarterback, rebuild the offensive line, and develop the next generation of #SpeedD D-linemen. Then take the field and win one final (?) Big 12 Championship before bailing for the deeper waters of the SEC.
Now? Everything is completely coming apart with Lincoln Riley’s decision to bail for USC in Hollywood, poach the Sooners’ top Southern Cal recruits from future classes, and apparently to leave behind a struggling locker room filled with portal applicants.
Beyond the shock of having enormous chunks of their depth chart hitting the portal and their future class leaders (Malachi Nelson in particular) bailing, this was also a stinging rebuke to the tradition of Oklahoma football. There aren’t supposed to be better situations than the one in Norman which would allow a program to poach the head coach.
Oklahoma quickly responded with a press conference featuring “Baghdad” Bob Stoops accepting an interim head coaching role while assuring Sooner fans the sky wasn’t falling. Athletic director Joel Castiglione hid a burning anger behind a friendly tone while discussing their intentions to conduct a thorough search for the next head coach.
Five days later, after clearing Championship weekend, it comes out they’re hiring current Clemson (and former Oklahoma) defensive coordinator Brent Venables.
For the younger fans, Venables was a longtime defensive coordinator for Oklahoma in the Bob Stoops era. After a relatively solid 2011 in which the Sooners experimented with 3-down fronts but took a few whoopings from Baylor and Oklahoma State (the more things change…) he was basically pushed out to make room for the return of Mike Stoops. Clemson seized the opportunity to hire him and he built numerous top 10 defenses there which have helped them win six ACC titles and two National Championships.
Who is Brent Venables?
If we know anything about Brent Venables it’s that he’s a very good defensive coordinator. He’s had both Oklahoma and Clemson as perennial top 10 units by advanced stats.
You can actually read a full breakdown of his scheme at Clemson written by my man Cameron Soran here. It’s pretty extensive, one of the complaints by Sooner players they turned into a narrative in 2012 when Mike Stoops took over was that Venables’ scheme was too complicated and they were going to simplify. They did, initially, then it all went to hell.
Part of the trick to Venables’ complexity on defense, aside from his legitimate skills as a teacher and in tying schemes together with a few rules, has been his reputation as a sign-stealer. You can run more calls if you have a lot of confidence that your defensive call is just the right one for what the offense is running. It was a thing around the ACC and Pittsburgh famously toppled them in 2016 by the score of 43-42 in part because of the shovel-option play and in part because they huddled and didn’t signal anything in from the sideline.
Ryan Day figured some solutions out for this problem as well last year, changing up their tempo and catching the Tigers failing to line up several times in the semi-final.
Clemson’s defenses, really all of Brent Venables’ defenses for as long as I’ve watched them, have been defined by the Under eagle principles of Bob Stoops’ base defense and fielding fast, regularly blitzed linebackers. It’s always a 4-3 defense but the Sam is a hybrid and he still uses Roy Williams types there. The last famous one was named Isaiah Simmons, the new one is named Trenton Simpson. We’ll talk more about fit to his current roster in a future post.
Brent Venables as a head coach is a relatively unknown quantity. He is an effective and energetic recruiter. Another principle of Clemson’s defenses has been the presence of 5-star talent along the D-line (not necessarily anywhere else). He wants difference-making athletes along the D-line and can recruit good athletes and develop them into stars in the defensive backfield with coaching, scheme, and anticipatory play-calling.
He’s been under three different head coaches who were either fantastic offensive minds (Bill Snyder) or made sure to employ an explosive offensive coordinator (Bob Stoops) and emphasize that side of the ball (Dabo Swinney).
Venables’ short-term challenge
Step one for Venables is landing his offensive coordinator. They have a lot of roster pieces to put together but Caleb Williams is going to want to hear about the new OC/QB coach and the direction of the offense. As Williams goes, much of the rest of the roster will go as well. There will be no shortage of suitors for his talents if he goes into the transfer portal, including Riley’s Trojans but perhaps also a Georgia, Penn State, Florida State, Miami, etc.
“Can he hire someone who can responsibility manage the opposite side of the ball and lean on that side of the ball to win games?” is always the big question for a coordinator turned head coach. Everyone has seen the head coach who either doesn’t know how to manage and support the staff and roster on the opposite end of the ball from their expertise or who doesn’t know how to play complementary football.
All the current rumors say Ole Miss’ Jeff Lebby would be the guy. Lebby is an RPO spread coach from the Art Briles tree. He married Briles’ daughter and coached in Waco with him several years, then came up under Josh Heupel running the same “veer and shoot” scheme at UCF and now at Ole Miss aboard the Lane Train. Has he ever called plays in his life while working with this head coaches? Probably not, but then the RPO play-call tends to put a lot of the decision-making on the quarterback anyways and he would have been charged with teaching them the game.
Anyways, the existing Oklahoma roster has a number of question marks they’ll want to get to work on. The NFL will likely claim the following names from the 2021 Oklahoma depth chart:
- LG Marquis Hayes
- FB Jeremiah Hall
- NT Perrion Winfrey
- EDGE Nik Bonitto
- DL Isaiah Thomas
- DL Jalen Redmond
As of this writing, the transfer portal has already claimed the following players (at least temporarily)
- QB Spencer Rattler
- TE Austin Stogner
- WR Theo Wease
- WR Jadon Haselwood (Arkansas bound)
- OL Brey Walker
And there are rumblings about quarterback Caleb Williams and wide receiver Marvin Mims also leaving town, among others. The risk is pretty high in general for Oklahoma because their roster tends to be comprised of out of state recruits. More on that later.
Naturally recruiting is also taking a hit with multiple blue chips already decommitted.
What looked like a strong roster is getting absolutely gutted with a massive talent exodus which could ultimately include both scholarship quarterbacks. The transfer portal can giveth and not just taketh away, but the Sooners’ first priority will be to try and prevent it from taking too much.
Oklahoma’s long-term challenge
This is the part Oklahoma fans don’t really want to think too much about. What if Lincoln Riley’s sense was that Oklahoma was going to struggle competing in the SEC and that they’d never have anywhere near the same success as they’ve had in the Big 12?
Sure SEC money will insure the athletic department’s coffers are filled and the program would be in strong shape in its’ primary role of serving the University, but how much fun would it be for the head coach?
The main scare for Oklahoma in the SEC is maintaining the existing strategy of being one of the two most talented teams in the league and the only one of the two with any idea of what they’re doing. Oklahoma is not going to be out-recruiting the rest of the SEC.
Check out their recruiting rankings over the last several years per 247.
- 2021: 10th nationally, 5th in the SEC
- 2020: 12th nationally, 8th in the SEC (9th if you count Texas)
- 2019: 6th nationally, 5th in the SEC (6th if you count Texas)
- 2018: 9th nationally, 3rd in the SEC (4th if you count Texas)
- 2017: 8th nationally, 4th in the SEC
If you go back further it gets worse before Lincoln Riley took over as head coach. I’m not a believer in recruiting rankings telling the whole story, but the point is Oklahoma won’t have the talent advantages in the SEC they have enjoyed in the Big 12.
What’s more, here’s a glimpse of where Oklahoma’s starting lineup in Bedlam 2021 came from:
The Sooners, for as long as I’ve followed this game, have always recruited at a pretty high level, hovering around the top 10. They’ve almost always done so by the following measure:
- Taking a massive share of the best players in OK and DFW
- Poaching regions that lack enough dominant powers to protect the territory. Namely CA, MO, the Mid-Atlantic, and of course Florida where everyone poaches because the players routinely leave.
- Otherwise fill up with carefully selected 3-star players who fit the system and have athletic upside.
Texas (particularly DFW) and Oklahoma will always be the lifeblood of Sooner recruiting, but they have to nationally recruit to build top 5 classes if that’s the path and they’ve never been a school to go into a place like Atlanta and just muscle out the other blue blood programs.
The more reliable path for the Sooners has been innovation and high level coaching. Bob Stoops was ahead of everyone in using speed on defense and playing a base nickel and he was also ahead offensively in using the Air Raid, using the spread run game, and using tempo.
What’s the plan for Brent Venables? Some of it is easy to guess, some is challenging.
He’ll certainly get Oklahoma in the hunt for the top defensive linemen within Oklahoma, Texas, and anywhere he thinks they have a shot to make a pull. That’ll be a bigger priority than it’s been for the Sooners in some time. Otherwise, he’ll recruit athleticism and mold defenses around speed.
Offensively? We’ll see. Will they aim their recruiting dollars (I’m talking NIL, of course) at continuing to land 5-star receivers and quarterbacks or will they need to re-allocate in order to put more emphasis to the D-line? If they do the latter, can they keep up with the SEC or will they just be another school with a good D-line who struggles to standout in a crowded field? Clemson would load up in recruiting early with a quarterback, wide receivers, a left tackle, and then D-line. More recently their capacity expanded. Where will it be for the Sooners? Riley’s teams loaded up with blue chip quarterbacks, receivers, and the odd running back. Can they maintain that approach while adding 5-star defensive tackles?
In the short term, can they keep Caleb Williams and maintain a pipeline of elite quarterback talent to Norman? Or will it look more like it did under Bob Stoops where the Sooners were innovative on offense and ended up with great quarterbacks who weren’t huge names in recruiting?
There are a lot of unanswered questions in Norman it’ll be interesting to see resolved in the coming months and year. Answers will start to come when we see:
- Who Venables hires as offensive coordinator.
- Which Sooners stay on the roster and which jump in the portal.
- How Oklahoma fares in the 2023 recruiting class.
What do you think of Oklahoma’s new head coach? Discuss for free on the Flyover Football board!
