Brent Venables reveals importance of transfer class helping Oklahoma defense

Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables is a defense guy. Thus, it’s no surprise the Sooners leader wants to improve his program’s iron curtain.

After adding seven defensive players through the 2023 transfer portal, Venables is seemingly on the right track. The second-year head coach discussed his hopes for this year’s defensive unit.

“Obviously, playing good defense is keeping people out of the end zone, and so improving in the areas where we can improve. You do that lots of different ways, whether it’s scheme, it’s players, it’s development, it’s teaching, it’s practicing.

“Again, it can’t ever happen fast enough. We haven’t been good on defense for a long time, but everywhere I’ve been, it’s been a rebuilding process to some degree. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but I’ve got a lot of faith in both our players, our staff, and certainly how we do what we do and our developmental processes,” Venables said.

With so many new faces on defense, Oklahoma should see rapid development. Dasan McCullough leads the Sooners’ transfer push. The 6-foot-5 EDGE boasted a fantastic freshman year at Indiana, totaling 49 tackles, 6.5 tackles for loss and four sacks. Now, the former four-star recruit joins Venables.

He isn’t the only one. Not to be outdone, Notre Dame transfer Jacob Lacey also joined the Sooners this offseason. Despite the senior’s decision to enter the transfer portal halfway through the Fighting Irish’s 2022 season, head coach Marcus Freeman spoke highly of Lacey.

“Lacey did a lot of great things for us. But it’s a deep position. He made a decision that, ultimately, he felt was best for him, and we respect it. We love Jacob,” Freeman said.

Now, Venables hopes Lacey and his fellow transfers can “do a lot of great things” for OU.

“I believe we’ll be better up the middle of our defense, and I look at where we were at really at every single position, and we didn’t have the competitive depth a year ago.

“We started the year pretty strong, and then we didn’t finish the year very well, particularly in, again, those fourth quarters of a bunch of games. We just didn’t have any juice left about the middle of the year on. The competitive depth will lead to better competitive stamina,” Venables said.

Oklahoma can only improve so much. The Sooners led the Big 12 in interceptions and tackles for loss last season. Nonetheless, Venables isn’t settling.

“We’ll be better fundamentally, we’ll have better aggressiveness, we’ll be better with our timing and our precision and our physicality,” Venables said.