Brent Venables reveals what he's taken from Bill Snyder, Bob Stoops and Dabo Swinney

Brent Venables has worked under a lot of talented coaches, but it’s Bill Snyder whom he considers to be his most influential mentor. Venables, the new head football coach at Oklahoma, played for Snyder at Kansas State from 1991-92, where he was recruited by a young defensive backs coach named Bob Stoops.

There he watched in awe as Snyder took one of college football’s perennial bottom feeders and turned them into one of the top programs in the country. In Venables’ first season as a player, the Wildcats finished 7-4 to record just the second winning season in school history. That was only the beginning, as two years later Snyder would deliver Kansas State’s first-ever bowl victory.

By that season, Venables was a graduate assistant for the Wildcats, a position he would hold until 1996 when he was promoted to linebackers coach. Kansas State won at least nine games all six years that Venables was on the staff. During his final year in 1998, the Wildcats finished the regular season 11-0 to earn their first No. 1 ranking in school history.

“My foundation started with Bill Snyder,” Venables said on the College Football Daily podcast. “He’s still to this day known as the architect of the biggest turnaround in the history of college football. What he was able to do to take that program that has close to the most losses ever. The last game that I coached there was the Big 12 championship when we were the No. 1 team in the country. It had the top-ranked defense in college football. I remember the last years we were there. And he’s had that program back even since I went to Oklahoma and Clemson. He got ’em back to No. 1 again. They had a great season and then I think lost to Baylor. Coach Stoops, remember he worked for coach Snyder. …Then went to bat for me along with Jim Leavitt when Jim Leavitt went to South Florida to start that program. I got promoted with coach Stoops’ encouragement. Pretty ironic.”

Stoops left Kansas State in 1996 to become the defensive coordinator at Florida, where he would stay through the 1998 season. Then in 1999 when Stoops was named the head coach at Oklahoma, he called up Venables to make him a linebackers coach and co-defensive coordinator. The pair won a national championship together in 2000 and seven Big 12 championships in 13 years.

In 2012, Venables left Norman to become the defensive coordinator at Clemson under Dabo Swinney. There the championship success continued as the Tigers won two national championships and five ACC titles over the past 10 seasons.

But despite being linked to so many legendary college football coaches, Brent Venables learned the most in his eight years under Bill Snyder. It’s those lessons that he will carry with him as he looks to carry on the winning tradition at Oklahoma.

“I cut my teeth under Bill Snyder,” he said. “He showed me what organization, what details, what consistency in your messaging and how to get more out of less. The grassroots of hard work, toughness, discipline, team and family. To never give up. That’s a mindset. To some people, it’s cliché and something cool to put on the wall. Then some people it’s in their DNA, their fiber. For us that were there during that era, we all deeply understand what that looks like. For me foundationally, I could not have learned from a better man than Bill Snyder.”