During Tuesday’s Board of Regents meeting, Oklahoma president Joseph Harroz Jr. and athletic director Joe Castiglione said again that they back Brent Venables as head coach of the Oklahoma football team.
Casiglione said, “Clearly, the season so far has not gone as we hoped or planned.” “That’s disappointing for a lot of people, including us, even though we’ve had a lot of problems, like an unusually high number of injuries.”
“We are very aware that we have not met the Oklahoma standard for 2024.” Still, we have a lot of faith in coach Venables and our team, and we’re fully committed to both helping them and finding all the ways we can make things better as soon as possible and in time for next year.
Venables’ third season at Oklahoma has ended with a 5–5 record. To make it to a bowl game, Oklahoma needs to win one of its last two games, which are at home against No.
11 Alabama and on the road against No. 15 LSU. As of 1998, the Sooners had never lost a bowl game. That was the year before Bob Stoops became head coach.
OU has also lost all five of its games in the SEC in its first season in the league. Harroz also said that he thought Venables would be a good leader for the school in the future.
He said of Venables, “We have the right coach.” “This is our coach.” We knew going into the SEC that it was going to be a tough year. You add that to all the changes that are happening in the NIL scene… We were aware that there would be some rough seas.
“Of course, we’d like to win more. We still trust the boss as much as we ever have, though.
Castiglione wouldn’t say “yes” or “no” when asked if Venables would be head coach next season. Instead, he said that his goal for the rest of this season and next year is to help Venables make the team better.
We’re focused on all the things that need to be done right now and next year,” Castiglione said when asked if Venables would come back in 2025.
Venables extended his deal through 2029 and gave him a raise. This was after leading the Sooners to a 10-3 record and the edge of making a New Year’s Six bowl in 2023.
“The university understood the transition we were making and the importance of creating stability throughout our program,” he said. You already know that this is a very special time in college sports, and that making and keeping teams is a bit of a mess.
“Stability and strength (is what we saw) as an important characteristic we wanted to embrace across many other areas, not just this contract, but fortifying the people (at the top) so we can be successful.”
If OU fired Venables at the end of the 2024 season, they would have to pay him $44.8 million to leave. After 2025, that number drops to $34.9 million, and after 2026, it drops to $26.2 million.
Castiglione said that the reason Venables’ contract was extended was so that they could handle the growth of the program going forward. “We had a very positive, tentative season last year and believed that stability would be important for our staff in how we recruit and retain players, even in this new and unique environment.”
After the 2023 season, Venables hired Seth Littrell, who was offensive analyst at the time, and Joe Jon Finley, who was tight ends coach, as co-offensive coordinators. Jeff Lebby had become head coach at Mississippi State.
Literell, OU’s play caller, was fired after seven weeks of bad offensive play that included blowout losses to Texas and South Carolina at home. Finley was promoted to play caller, and Kevin Johns was moved to co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
Venables will have another chance this summer to hire an offensive coordinator who can fix the second-worst scoring offense in the SEC.
Castiglione told Venables, “I believe in him,” that he would hire the right offensive coordinator. “As a defensive coordinator, he’s faced the best offensive coordinators in college football.” Like any good head coach, he knows what makes teams hard to protect.
“We want to be focused on hiring a coach that can obviously assemble the strategy to make our offense one of the toughest to defend in college football.”