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Column: For Oklahoma, Things Could Only Get Worse From Here
The Sooners are just 7-7 and have shown little improvement after the Texas game in two seasons under Brent Venables. Now in the SEC, how bad could things get?
John E. Hoover | Oct 18, 2024
Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables on the sidelines in Dallas
Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables on the sidelines in Dallas / Andrew Dieb-Imagn Images
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Oklahoma Sooners
Brent Venables keeps repeating it, perhaps hoping he can speak it into existence.
“We gotta get better.”
Oklahoma’s football coach said it again on Saturday evening in Dallas, after the Sooners absorbed a 34-3 loss, another embarrassing blowout at the hands of their rivals.
The bad news, of course, is that getting better not going to just happen. It’s not going to happen by osmosis, by being in an elite conference. There’s no genie living in a magic lamp, waiting to be conjured so he can fix the Sooners’ travails. Good luck finding that one lucky star to wish upon, not that it would help. Hope, as they say, is not a strategy. The power of prayer can be a powerful thing, but can it fix the OU offense?
Now, here’s the worse news for Sooner Nation:
In two years under Venables, things have only gotten worse after the Texas game. An argument could be made that they’ve gotten drastically worse. It’s a small sample size, but there seem to be some identifiable trends for how the Sooners bounce back after their annual emotional midseason showdown with the Longhorns.
In 2022 and 2023, OU’s record is just 7-7 following the Texas game. Before the Texas game, Venables’ teams are 12-3.
So from the empirical evidence Venables’ teams have established so far, unless OU dramatically reverses that trend in 2024 — the worst is very much yet to come.
Venables said he doesn’t use Texas as any kind of measuring stick for where the Oklahoma program is, but maybe he would be wise to start. In that same timeframe, Steve Sarkisian’s team is 11-4 after playing OU, with one of those losses coming in the College Football Playoff.
“Two years ago when we won the Golden Hat, you might have thought we won the Super Bowl,” Sarkisian said. “This year was like, ‘OK, we got the Golden Hat back, but let’s put it in the trophy case and let’s keep grinding, let’s keep going.’ So I think that’s the mentality of our team.”
The bottom line there is that, after a decade of massive underachievement by the coaches who came before him, Sarkisian has built something tangible in Austin, and now he’s got the No. 1-ranked team in the country that certainly looks playoff-bound once more.
In their first year in the Southeastern Conference, it’s Texas who’s getting all the flowers for having the league’s (and maybe the nation’s) most complete team, while OU has maybe the worst offense in all of college football.
There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with using Texas as your measuring stick. Bud Wilkinson used to say if you can beat Texas, you can beat anybody. Barry Switzer said you can keep your job at OU as long as you beat Texas. Those guys only have six national championships on their resume. There’s no reason to hide from that. For Venables pretend otherwise is to coach with his head in the sand.
And here’s more bad news for OU fans: there are no get-right games coming up against Kansas or Baylor or Texas Tech or TCU or Iowa State. Beating Maine in November will give the Sooners five wins this season — but where is No. 6? Is there a No. 7? Is No. 8 even a possibility?
Here’s the thing: historically under Venables 2022 and 2023, the Sooners haven’t just played .500 ball after the Texas game. They’ve actually gotten worse.
Red River Blowout
In 120 meetings, Oklahoma has lost to rival Texas by 30 points or more just eight times. Two of those happened in the last three years. Here are OU’s most lopsided losses in the Red River , after beating the No. 3-ranked Horns in Dallas on Dillon Gabriel’s TD pass with 15 seconds left, OU almost lost to first-year Big 12 member Central Florida in Norman. Then, the Sooners went on the road to Kansas and coached an historically bad game and lost to the Jayhawks for the first time in a generation. Then they went to Stillwater and compounded one error on top of another — by coaches and by players — and lost to Oklahoma State.
The Sooners hadn’t lost to OSU and KU in the same season in almost a hundred years. But here they are.
OU did get right against West Virginia, but then went on the road again to Provo, UT, and needed a game-saving pick six from Billy Bowman and some fourth-quarter passing heroics from Jackson Arnold to hold off BYU.
Finishing the season with a comfortable but not entirely stress-free (69-45) home win over TCU sent the Sooners into December on an odd vibe.
Then, after the offensive coordinator and the quarterback and a bunch of other players opted out of the Alamo Bowl, OU blew a fourth-quarter lead and lost by double digits to Arizona.
Venables’ first season as a head coach turned sour before the Texas game — the 49-0 loss at Fair Park was just the third of three straight defeats — but that team never really got anything figured out.
OU beat Kansas 52-42 in Norman, then eked out a 38-35 win at Iowa State. Then came a 38-35 home loss to a bad Baylor team, followed by a 23-20 road loss to a bad West Virginia team.
Venables picked up his first Bedlam win against No. 24-ranked OSU, but then went on the road and lost 51-48 to a bad Texas Tech team.
A 35-32 loss to No. 13 Florida State in Orlando finished the season and gave the Sooners their first losing record since the John Blake era.
Clearly, not every one of those games tied directly back to OU-Texas week. The emotions of that week should be flushed out and long gone by the time November rolls around. And of course conference games in the back half of the season should be more challenging than non-conference games.
But just check more recent history for how this thing should look at Oklahoma.
Bob Stoops won 79.9 percent of his games as Oklahoma’s head coach from 1999 to 2016.
But his record after the Texas game was 106-28, a winning percentage of .791. Now consider that also included a 7-1 record in the Big 12 Championship Game and a 5-6 mark in BCS bowl games — 1-3 in national title showdowns. You want tough games? Those are tough games.
Venables has zero conference titles and is 0-2 in the Cheez-It Bowl and the Alamo Bowl.
Anybody remember Lincoln Riley’s annual mantra about “Championship November?” Riley’s overall career winning percentage at OU was .846. Say what you want about Riley’s playoff results, but his teams were 32-6 in his five seasons after the Sooners played Texas (which included a 3-0 mark in Big 12 title games). That’s an .842 winning percentage after the Red River Rivalry.
For that matter, Riley was 5-1 head-to-head in the Red River Rivalry.
Oklahoma isn’t a program that should ever have to endure a sustained lull. It’s certainly not a program that should rank in the bottom of the NCAA offensive statistical rankings in just about every category, like Venables’ 2024 squad does.
Oklahoma is now 4-2 overall and 1-2 in SEC play. The schedule ahead would portend more losses even if the Sooners weren’t struggling. But they are. The offense still has no identity and can’t generate first downs, much less points. The defense can be elite, as Texas found out early, but needs just a modicum of support from the other side of the ball to carry this team.
OU went a generation without losing back-to-back regular season games, but Venables did it three times in 2022 and once in 2023 — almost all after playing Texas.
If now-unranked Oklahoma can’t resolve things this week against unranked South Carolina, the Gamecocks are certainly good enough to start Venables’ next losing streak.
Published Oct 14, 2024|Modified Oct 18, 2024
John E. Hoover
JOHN E. HOOVER
John is an award-winning journalist whose work spans five decades in Oklahoma, with multiple state, regional and national awards as a sportswriter at various newspapers. During his newspaper career, John covered the Dallas Cowboys, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Oklahoma Sooners, the Oklahoma State Cowboys, the Arkansas Razorbacks and much more. In 2016, John changed careers, migrating into radio and launching a YouTube channel, and has built a successful independent media company, DanCam Media. From there, John has written under the banners of Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Fan Nation and a handful of local and national magazines while hosting daily sports talk radio shows in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and statewide. John has also spoken on Capitol Hill in Oklahoma City in a successful effort to put more certified athletic trainers in Oklahoma public high schools. Among the dozens of awards he has won, John most cherishes his national “Beat Writer of the Year” from the Associated Press Sports Editors, Oklahoma’s “Best Sports Column” from the Society of Professional Journalists, and Two “Excellence in Sports Medicine Reporting” Awards from the National Athletic Trainers Association. John holds a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications from East Central University in Ada, OK. Born and raised in North Pole, Alaska, John played football and wrote for the school paper at Ada High School in Ada, OK. He enjoys books, movies and travel, and lives in Broken Arrow, OK, with his wife and two kids.
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