Brent Venables Pushes the Right Buttons in November, Oklahoma Headed to College Football Playoff

NORMAN — Just a couple days after Oklahoma’s loss to Ole Miss in late October, Brent Venables did something that goes against his nature.

During a team meeting, Venables brought up the ESPN College Football Playoff Predictor and showed his team the numbers.

Go 4-0 during a November schedule that looked daunting before the season and only slightly less so entering the final month of the regular season, and the chances for the Sooners to make the CFP field were high.

“It was like 92%,” Venables remembered Saturday after the Sooners finished off their Red November with a 17-13 win over LSU to cap off perhaps the team’s most memorable month since October 2000.

“I’m not really like that,” Venables added. “Like, ‘Let’s look up there,’ but I think our guys needed a shot in the arm and a vision for what is in front of us if we just put our head down and go have a great Monday practice.”

That 34-26 loss to the Rebels on Oct. 25 looked devastating at the time, but might’ve ultimately been a blessing in disguise.

Read More Oklahoma 17, LSU 13

Venables’ message after that Ole Miss loss resonated with his team.

“Having a coach like BV, he’s reminding us everyday in team meetings that we just keep on going,” defensive end Gracen Halton said. “No matter what happens, we’ve just got to overcome, and that’s what really the whole season was about — just overcoming. The harder schedule, that don’t matter. It’s just football. If we come ready to play, we can beat everybody.”

Venables called it a “circle the wagons” moment.

“Tried to instill confidence in who we are,” Venables said. “We lost a tough game that night against a really good football team. We had our opportunities and the game teaches you a lot of hard, tough lessons.”

Venables’ message wasn’t the only one that helped turn the tide.

“That loss, I think, was the best thing that could have happened to this team,” safety Peyton Bowen said. “Going into that game, we really wanted to win and had multiple chances to win. Offense had a good game, but we didn’t play to our standard. Coach (Kevin) Wilson came up to us right before Tennessee and talked to us that we create the standard. The standard was here, but you create your standard for Team 131. Asked us if we had been playing up to that? From that talk, I think that talk hit us way different, more than postgame Ole Miss talk. Ever since that talk, it’s been head down, foot on the gas.

“This team is amazing.”

Now, after vanquishing Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri and LSU, the Sooners are indeed headed to the playoff.

They’ll get some time to recover ahead of the Dec. 7 CFP Selection Show.

“We’ll see what is in front of us right now,” Venables said. “We’re going to take a couple of days off, get a couple lifts in. We’ll have a couple of young-guy practices, 12-period practices, and get our bodies and our minds and our spirits where they need to be. But man, I’m super thankful to be their coach. They just got to right stuff — all the stuff that you can’t put a price on, you can’t put a measuring stick on, these guys got it.”

For players who went through last year’s 6-7 season, and some of the other recent adversity, making the playoff field is even sweeter.

“So many guys could have quit, could have left,” Bowen said. “The guys that stayed here and kept going, working in the spring, summer and what it’s all came to, it’s so inspirational and touches and moves me about how much I want to play for this team, day-in, day-out.”