Brent Venables says momentum from bowl game has carried over for Oklahoma

Oklahoma had a particularly rough first season under new coach Brent Venables in 2022, in part because departing coach Lincoln Riley made off with a good bit of the talent, including eventual Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams.

But Venables hasn’t made excuses for the team’s 6-7 campaign last fall.

“We fell incredibly short of our standards and expectations,” Brent Venables said. “But this is a group, I think if they showed something last year through a really tough, challenging year, through a lot of strain and failure and experience where a lot of these guys had never had that experience before, but they kept swinging. They took a punch.”

Oklahoma’s season had a very rollercoaster type feel to it.

The Sooners won each of their first three games by at least 30 points. Then a three-game skid hit, one that ended with a 49-0 drubbing at the hands of rival Texas.

The team then bounced back and took down a ranked Kansas squad and survived Iowa State on the road. An upset win over a ranked Oklahoma State squad a few weeks later was enough to become bowl eligible.

“If that’s the right term to use to describe all of it (we) took a punch and continued to fight, believe, played for one another, played with great pride,” Brent Venables said .”You’ve got to have that. If you don’t have that then you’ve got a lot of problems.

“For me, that gave me what I needed to see that says, you know what, a lot of other people don’t see it, but I do. Having been in a lot of locker rooms for a long time as a player and a coach, that’s what it looks like.”

With the roster a little bit more stable now, Brent Venables is hoping his guys can build off whatever momentum they can find to carry forward from 2022.

Oklahoma was competitive in the Cheez-It Bowl against Florida State but ultimately fell short 35-32. That was kind of the story of 2022 for Venables’ bunch.

“Again, there’s no excuses that’s going to justify having the kind of season that we did,” Brent Venables said. “Internally we felt like we know where we came up short in a lot of different places. And now, as I said before, I don’t know if you’re building off of that, but even in that (bowl) game we could have taken a strong, commanding lead and have a chance to win the game, but we didn’t.

“But there’s a lot of things that you can build off from that and give you hope going into this year. I’m not sure if that’s momentum or not, but I don’t think our guys have not stopped believing in what we’re asking them to do and what the vision is and, again, what it takes to be successful and for us to flip that script.”