As a fourth-year head coach at Norman, Brent Venables is officially entering a pivotal year in 2025, facing unprecedented pressure. A 6-7 record in 2022 was an edgy patch. A 10-3 campaign in 2023 provided some positive signs for the future. But another 6-7 record in 2024 has made 2025 nothing but the most important year both for Venables and for the Sooners. However, where he hasn’t been sitting idle, making some pivotal moves in the portal, and reshuffling the coaching room overall, he certainly has missed out on a potential dream team that could have been formed with Jim Knowles on the defense.

The veteran head coach appears to be attempting to improve the situation by making some significant, eye-catching additions to the defensive team.

Brent Venables tries to sort things on the defense after a massive missed shot

University of Oklahoma head football coach Brent Venables added two marquee defensive staff members on Saturday. Nate Dreiling has been hired as the inside linebackers coach, and Wes Goodwin was entrusted with the assistant linebackers/outside linebackers coach post.

”What Brent Venables was doing here is he decided to take over calling the plays on defense; it makes sense that BV would do this, and where this helps him is Nate and West are going to be able to recruit linebackers,” said analyst Jay on the February 18th episode of the Unfair Sports podcast, but he took the decision not without a grain of salt.

All the pre-hype is fine, but Jay felt the same about Zac Alley, the former DC of the Sooners, who was a big-time failure in terms of adding quality recruits. So, the benchmark of their unfinished duties naturally flowed to the new hires.

Setting the clear-cut expectation, Jay continued, ”I enjoyed Zac Alley, defensive coordinator. I was pretty excited about him, but he didn’t bring in a single recruit while he was here. So, now you have Nate and West, whose job is to do that at linebacker and really develop those guys. We’ve got veterans in there bringing some young players to go with them, and I think that they’ll be able to do that. This is one way he’s gonna be able to fit.”

The new defensive lineups (Venables, Dreiling, Goodwin, and Brandon Hall, who have held the role of defensive coordinator in their careers) will certainly bring a new flair of hope to a dwindled program after Zac Alley left for West Virginia, but it’s safe to say if Venables had been a little careful since the beginning of his stint at Norman, the defense would not have been a challenge at this point.

Brent Venables’ self-inflicted errors made things rough on the defense 

History has witnessed a pretty common trend between players that has triggered them to leave their team as long as any favored coach leaves for any other team. But Brent Venables didn’t let it happen when he moved on from the Tigers for the Sooners three years back. There is some fair play theory working here.

Brent Venables said he has not tried to recruit any Clemson de-commitments. He further stated that he holds a deep respect for Dabo Swinney and is committed to doing things “the right way.” In the age of poaching and tampering, it’s acceptable to respect Dabo Swinney, but there is a significant difference between acquiring players in an unethical and sneaky manner and signing them in a fair and rightful manner.

As long as players flipped their commitments from Swinney and are ready to join him in the Sooners, that should not be considered any proverbial sin. It’s just Venables weakening his own roots there. Explaining the blunder, Jay said, ”Some of the Clemson kids wanted to join BR Venables; a lot of them just love BV, and him not bringing that is, to me, the first step that led to the big issues you ran into because as he was developing on the defensive side of the ball, it took him a couple of years to really filter through the players with what transfers he could bring in to give us the defense we had this season. It took him three years to literally get the defense at this point.”

We will see how Venables will make things through the sheer pressure of a bigger, better 2025 while continuing to hustle for the defensive amendments.