Eli LedermanDec 19, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseEli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
Brent Venables eager for No. 8 Oklahoma’s CFP matchup vs. Alabama (2:46)Venables explains the Sooners’ excitement to host a College Football Playoff first-round game against No. 9 Alabama and what the team must do to beat the Crimson Tide. (2:46)
Three seats to Venables’ left, veteran Sooners linebacker Kobie McKinzie felt a different energy radiating from his head coach. Minutes later, in an otherwise empty locker room inside TCU’s Amon G. Carter Stadium, Venables spoke like a man who knew what was coming.
“He looked me in my eyes and told me, ‘We’re going to be all right,'” McKinzie recalled after a recent practice. “I saw the passion. I could feel it in his presence. He couldn’t take enough deep breaths to calm himself down because he was so eager to get this figured out. He was ready to go to work.”
Venables left the Armed Forces Bowl on the hot seat. A month later, he announced plans to take over as the Sooners’ defensive playcaller this fall, assuming full control of the defense for the first time as a head coach and placing a calculated bet on a make-or-break season in Norman. As No. 8 Oklahoma rolls into its first College Football Playoff appearance since 2019 on Friday, the decision stands as one of the most consequential offseason moves in the sport in 2025.
“Everything’s just different for you when you’re calling it,” Venables told ESPN. “You feel this responsibility of doing it on your side of the ball …You live and die in the course of the week. Literally you’re born and then you die at the end of it. I think in a good, healthy way.”
Venables’ latest elite defense is powered by a core of experienced defenders, many of them in their third and fourth years playing in the system. It shows. Oklahoma entered the postseason ranked in the top 10 nationally in points per game (13.9), total defense (273.9 YPG) and run defense (81.4 YPG). Its 41 sacks are tied with Texas A&M for the national lead. No program across the country has logged more tackles for loss (115) in 2025.
That defensive unit stifled Auburn, LSU, Missouri and Tennessee en route to a CFP berth. But no win in Oklahoma’s path looms larger than its Nov. 15 win at Alabama, a 23-21 victory fueled by a defensive master class from Venables. On Friday, the Sooners host the No. 9 Crimson Tide (8 p.m. ET, ABC) in a playoff rematch, looking to defeat Alabama for the second time in 34 days.
Venables’ confidence at Oklahoma never wavered. Nor did his determination. Operating with a matured defensive core and what Venables calls “the best staff I’ve been a part of,” one of college football’s most creative defensive minds is back in the saddle, firmly at the center of a ferocious defensive juggernaut and a seismic turnaround in Norman.
“It’s pure passion and pure heart coming from him,” McKinzie said. “That’s what the program has been built on. That’s what the defense has been built on. It will never be replicated.”
OF COURSE, VENABLES was never not involved in the defense at Oklahoma over the past few years. But after nearly three decades spent living and breathing it every day, it took him four years to find the right balance as he adjusted to the duties of life as a head coach with the Sooners.
Venables handed playcalling to former Duke coach Ted Roof in 2022, then split the duties with Roof in 2023. When Venables fired Roof following the 2023 season, the Sooners brought in Zac Alley, a 30-year-old protégé who had worked for Venables at Clemson, to call plays in 2024.
None of those arrangements lasted more than a season. More crucially, although Oklahoma showed flashes of brilliance, it didn’t look like a Venables unit. The Sooners never finished better than 29th in scoring defense from 2022 through 2024. After Alley left for West Virginia last December, Venables didn’t necessarily need a nudge, but two of his former bosses still shared their thoughts.
“I expressed to him that calling plays was the best thing he could do,” former OU coach Bob Stoops told ESPN. Weeks after the Armed Forces Bowl, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney and Venables spent a few days together at the American Football Coaches Association Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. “He knew what was at stake this year,” Swinney said. “He just took it head on.”
After cutting his teeth under Bill Snyder at Kansas State, Venables joined Stoops at Oklahoma in 1999 and won a national title the next year. A decade later, he landed with Swinney at Clemson. While capturing a pair of national championships, Venables burnished his reputation as a loud-barking mad scientist and emerged as one of the nation’s sharpest tactical minds.
When he decided to take over playcalling duties earlier this year, Venables’ explanation was simple: “Why am I going to call the defense?” he said in March. “Because I’m good at it.”
Venables, notoriously, likes to tinker pre-snap. Under previous setups, Bowen recalled, there could be occasional confusion around signal calling to the field when Venables and another coordinator were operating together. Sometimes playcalls got crossed entirely. With Venables in full control, multiple Sooners said those processes have run more smoothly in 2025.
McKinzie swears the 55-year-old coach has a photographic memory. “It’s crazy, dude, he doesn’t have to see the play or have anybody draw anything,” McKinzie said. “He can literally tell you the exact formation and exactly what they did. That’s how you know you’re around one of the great ones.”
In previous seasons, Venables roamed across multiple meetings while coordinators — Roof or Alley — led the primary defensive sessions. Known for his meticulous film study and attention to detail dating to his earliest days as an assistant at Oklahoma, Venables is now at the forefront of Oklahoma’s defensive meetings, offering his players an essential asset.
“You just get to pick his mind throughout the whole week,” McKinzie said. “I try to sit as close to him as possible.”
Playcalling duties have altered nearly every part of Venables’ game week schedule. In his words, it has taken the job into a more “intimate space,” both relationally and logistically. Breaking down film. Building packages. Game-planning. Meeting with his staff. Meeting with players.
“The anticipation of game day is different, too,” Venables said. “It all just becomes more a part of your DNA each week and then across the season as opposed to a CEO-type coaching of role.”
For that, Venables credits the staff around him, from assistant coaches to a revamped front office. One of Venables’ favorite parts of the week, he says, is the morning meetings with his defensive staff, which includes offseason hires Wes Godwin — who replaced Venables as Clemson’s defensive coordinator in 2022 — and former Utah State defensive coordinator Nate Dreiling. The arrival of first-year general manager Jim Nagy has freed Venables up more, too.
“I knew I needed to trust the people that I’ve hired,” Venables said. “It’s all, ‘Coach Venables is getting back and calling plays,’ Man, the collaboration is very real. It’s not like I’m giving that lip service.”
Given his perpetual well of intensity, it would be misleading to suggest Venables is reenergized this fall. But settled into the rhythms of his playcalling duties, ingrained in the minutiae and fully hands-on with his defense, Venables appears as comfortable as he ever has been as a head coach.
“You’d like to be a head coach where you can be the good guy and a connector,” Venables said. “I certainly like to have fun. But fun for me is when we’re whupping people.”
In the 23-21 win over then-No. 4 Alabama on Nov. 15, Oklahoma had looked as close to Venables’ vaunted Clemson defenses as it had at any point across his four seasons in charge.
The Sooners puzzled Crimson Tide quarterback Ty Simpson with exotic pressures and sacked the Heisman hopeful six times. They turned three Alabama turnovers into 17 points, headlined by an 87-yard pick-six from Eli Bowen. Oklahoma created constant pressure in the pocket and smothered every available lane, angle or opening in the run game.
“Every one of you guys putting that freaking jersey on,” Venables told his players. “You guys have made the decision to work. To improve. To get better. To kick the door in. To believe. To respond. That’s what you guys have chosen to do. I didn’t make one freaking tackle tonight.”
The performance was everything Venables had promised in his introductory news conference on Dec. 6, 2021. On Friday, the Sooners will attempt to stifle the Crimson Tide again, led by Venables and perhaps the most suffocating defense across the 12-team CFP field, a unit that has all the very best elements that have defined Venables’ elite units of the past.
Anchored by sack leader R Mason Thomas and interior stars David Stone, Gracen Halton, Damonic Williams and Jayden Jackson, the Sooners sit atop the nation in both sacks and runs stops of zero or negative yards, just like Venables’ national title-winning defense in 2018.
That group, led by All-Americans Austin Bryant, Clelin Ferrell and Christian Wilkins, logged six sacks in the national semifinal against Notre Dame. This fall, Oklahoma hammered Auburn quarterback Jackson Arnold for nine sacks in September. A month later, the Sooners taxed South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers six times before creating 13 pressures against Alabama.
Within a unit nicknamed the “Dog Pound,” the Sooners roll deep, too. Per ESPN Research, Oklahoma had 10 defensive linemen register 100-plus snaps during the regular season, more than all but three other defenses across the SEC.
“They just do a great job of causing chaos,” Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer said of the Sooners’ defense this week. “They love the tackles for loss and the sacks. There’s obviously a triggerman. Coach Venables [is] one of the best that there is at doing it.”