Brent Venables details how recruiting strategy changes with transfer portal

Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables spent a fair amount of time during his press conference Tuesday talking about the transfer portal and its impact already on the college football season. He was asked about if and how his strategy for the transfer portal changes each cycle.

“It changes based on your needs,” Venables said. “Maybe what you thought at the beginning of the year, by the end of the year, things reveal themselves and maybe you’re somewhere else. But you have an inkling with guys graduating, where young people are…What the portal allows you to do, you can enhance a position when you have sudden departures, whether (they) leave on their own or maybe you’ve got a bunch of guys at one position graduating or they declare early for the draft. It allows you to, where you feel you don’t have as many questions answered, maybe you can bring in a guy that that is more of a safety valve, if you will.”

The Sooners signed 19 players in the transfer portal last cycle, headlined by linebacker Dasan McCullough, wide receiver Brenen Thompson and tight end Austin Stogner.

“But the biggest impact is where somebody can come at a position of need and make you better immediately,” Venables said. “It all depends on where your roster is and what type of guys that you’re able to recruit out of high school. Where we have been the the first couple of years is, to me, my vision is it’ll be not as much. But I’m not naive. I know how with the fluidity of players being able to leave, you’ve got to maximize when you feel like you need to, the opportunity to recruit in the free agent market.”

Brent Venables thinks transfer portal has added parity to college football

The top storyline of the first week of the college football season was Colorado‘s upset of TCU, which has been labeled as an example of how quickly a team can turn itself over thanks to the transfer portal. Texas State, another team that had major turnover, also sprung an upset, beating Baylor.

Venables said those results doesn’t surprise him.

“I don’t know if it’s been the portal or not,” Venables sais. “Maybe it is. There’s all kinds of great stories out there. It’s going to create parody. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. The only part that I don’t love is that we give young people no reason to pause. As we know, we’ve all been an emotional and out-of-whack 18, 19, 20 year old. Impulsive by nature, young people are.”

For Venables, what he worries about with the portal are people making quick decisions and losing out on the opportunity to build long-term alumni connections at a school.

Venables has experience this first hand. He played at Kansas State and then coached there for half a decade. He has since spent the past 20-plus years coaching at two schools in Clemson and Oklahoma.

“I’m just coming at it (as) a dad and somebody that believes wholeheartedly in loyalty and in building something and sticking through some tough moments,” Venables said. “That’s not a bad thing to stick around and figure things out. There’s always exceptions but I don’t know. I kind of like it. I won’t like it when it hurts the Oklahoma Sooners. You can’t blame me. But it’s exciting. Who doesn’t like March Madness, right? Everybody loves March Madness for all the obvious reasons. It really doesn’t matter how I feel at the end of the day because I’m not changing it. Nobody that makes decisions have asked me, ‘Hey, what do you think coach Venables?'”