Brent Venables speaks about Oklahoma’s move to the SEC and its impact on recruiting
By Keith Farner
Published:
Brent Venables is preparing Oklahoma for the transition to the SEC, and one valuable aspect of that is recruiting.
“Careful what you wish for, right?,” Venables said, per Tom Green. “I say that with much respect. It’s exciting. It’s exciting to say it. It gets you charged up … I love creating vision. I love talking about the future.”
Earlier, Sooners defensive backs coach Jay Valai, who has coached at Georgia and Alabama, described what differentiates the SEC from other conferences ahead of the Sooners’ move to the SEC next year: “The SEC is built on hate.”
In the mean time, Venables is aware of what the Sooners need to improve on coming off last year’s 6-7 mark. Venables said last month at Big 12 Media Days that he and the staff looked at every part of the program, and self-scouted about what the problems were.
One-score games were a problem, as Oklahoma went 0-5 in that scenario last season.
“We needed to improve our red-zone defense and handling the fourth quarter of games,” Venables said. “I really love the competitive depth that we’ve developed with our current and returning players and what we’ve recruited out of high school and the transfer portal. I really believe that because of the competitive depth, we’ll have a little bit stronger fourth quarter output on both sides of the ball, a quarter of football where we performed very poorly last year and lent to again five one-score losses.”
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
