Nick Saban explains what makes Brent Venables a great defensive coach
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Nick Saban knows a little something about elite defenses in the SEC, and he has the championship hardware to prove it.
On Friday, during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, the coaching legend paid tribute to a current SEC head coach who’s showing that he, too, knows a lot about leading stellar defenses at the highest level of college football. That would be Brent Venables, the head coach at Oklahoma who has a very big game coming up on Saturday afternoon.
Venables will lead the 11th-ranked Sooners into The Big House to play Michigan in a noon ET kickoff on FOX. Oklahoma blasted UTEP in its season opener last Friday night while Michigan needed that controversial Hail Mary to escape with a Week 1 win over Western Michigan.
The Wolverines will surely need to be a lot better on offense in Week 2 to put up enough points against that stingy OU defense, the unit that Saban was complimenting so much on Friday.
Saban believes that when it comes to defense, Venables is near the top of the list in all of college football, and that means Michigan will be heavily challenged all afternoon.
“I think (Brent) Venables is one of the best defensive coordinators ever, and I know he’s a head coach now, but he’s still calling the defenses, and he’s the one guy that’s so aggressive that he’s always trying to put you behind the 8-ball by creating negative plays on offense,” Nick Saban said. “He does it by, he’s one of the guys on defense that’s taking advantage of the green dot all the time. In other words, he wants to see what you’re in, he’s gonna keep messing around until they can’t tell the quarterback anything else, and then catch you in something that he wants to try to create a negative play.”
Oklahoma won’t be playing an SEC game on Saturday as it ventures north to The Big House to face Michigan, but the Sooners surely have their eyes on the conference title in December. Here is what the Kalshi market is currently saying about Oklahoma’s chances to climb the SEC mountain and be the last team standing in 2026:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
