Brent Venables reacts to opt out decision by Nico Iamaleava at Tennessee

The Nico Iamaleava decision had everyone in college football in a blender, even Oklahoma coach Brent Venables. Okay, well, not a blender, but everyone had a reaction to the stunning opt out amid an NIL negotiation at Tennessee.

Venables, luckily for him, has not dealt with that type of situation to this point. He prided he and his staff’s ability to retain high school players and not rely on the portal and NIL in large sums.

So without having to deal with a star player opting out, Venables didn’t have much to say on Iamaleava’s situation. Just more so preaching to the choir about his roster building philosophy.

“We haven’t had to address anything like that,” Venables said. “I’ve never been through anything like that … You want to be out in front of everything, you know? I think being proactive, and I think retention is the most important part of the whole puzzle. And I think it starts inside out, and you want to develop a locker room that has continuity, consistency, stability, that’s healthy to be successful and I think if you look at our roster and the numbers that you know we’ve signed, you know, each year it’s gone down, and that’s ideally what you want. You know you’re going to have some fluidity. That’s just the nature of where we’re at today.” 

But, this is just the nature of the business these days, as Venables put it. Heck, that’s why Venables and Oklahoma hired former Senior Bowl director Jim Nagy to be the football team’s general manager.

“You want guys that are sprinkled throughout your roster that have been here three, four or five years,” Venables said. “In a perfect world you want a roster that has somewhere in that 75 to 25, 80 to 20 High School to portal range. I think that’s a philosophy that we all believe in from a continuity standpoint. 

“But the front office is there to try to be, again, your headlights and to be again proactive and to anticipate and to have on-hand management when it comes to again, the fluidity and the ability to adapt and pivot at any step along the way.”

The good news is Venables is focused on his own team improving and luckily hasn’t had an Iamaleava situation. Maybe the Sooners aren’t immune to something like that, but for now, a proper program plan seems to be in place.