COLUMN: Despite Recent Downturn, Oklahoma Coach Brent Venables Denies Texas Hangover

NORMAN — So Brent Venables doesn’t believe in a Texas hangover.

That’s good. Neither did Bob Stoops, and it worked out great for him. His teams almost never lost after playing the Longhorns.

But for Venables’ Oklahoma football team, there has definitely been some kind of major disconnect since beating the Longhorns back on Oct. 7.

So this isn’t about dealing with a "Texas hangover" so much as it's an exploration for why OU played at such a high level three weeks ago but has since hit back-to-back lows in 2023.

In response to questions and complaints about the Sooners’ strength of schedule over the first five games, OU players left Dallas asking, “what they gonna say now?” After going 6-7 last year, there was a necessary arrogance in their tone. To win, one must first believe one can win.

Well, now the question is much more difficult to answer.

What in the world is going on?

How does Oklahoma take down the No. 3-ranked team in the country with authority, then need an escape against a winless conference opponent, then lose to Kansas for the first time in a generation?

Moreover, how did the Sooners go from runaway Big 12 favorite (and midseason FPI favorite to win the national championship) to suddenly everyone wondering if they can win a game at all in what the program only recently referred to as “championship November?”

Especially with an open date between Texas and this two-week tumble, it’s a curious phenomenon.

“I take each week as its own,” Venables told me Tuesday during his weekly press conference.

There are certainly mechanisms in place for college football coaches to try to make that happen — Sunday you do this, Monday you do that, Tuesday you do something else, and then next week you repeat the exact same regimen — but it’s probably unrealistic to expect 19- to 22-year-olds to adhere completely to such a myopic viewpoint.

Not when they put so much emotion into beating their most hated rival and then celebrate wildly for all the world to see and then evolve into national media darlings during their week off.

So I asked Venables a quick follow-up question: he doesn’t think they're connected at all?

It seems human nature that one game’s process and ultimate outcome can lead to 120 players feeling a certain way about themselves, and that that feeling can carry over into the following week's practice and preparation.

“Maybe it is (connected). Maybe it isn’t,” he said. “I don't look at it like that. I just look at what we need to do better, what we did well, what we need to do well this week. That's how I look at it.

“And when we win, we celebrate. You know, maybe they don't get as many clicks or likes or whatever as it does when you play Texas. But you put a lot of work in the course of a week, and certainly going into the season. So when you have some some success, you want to celebrate it. And then we move on. You know, that's what a good mature team can do.”

And there’s the hook: In just their second season under Venables, maybe this team really isn’t as good as they looked in the Cotton Bowl, and maybe this team isn’t really as mature as they thought they were that day in Dallas. They raised everyone’s expectations, including their own, and then they didn’t reach those expectations in either of their next two games because of youth or false confidence or, certainly, a handful of injuries that have taken their toll.

Did they believe the hype? Did they lose focus? Did they suddenly think they were something they’re not — at least not yet?

“I wouldn’t say we got unfocused at all, because we had a bye week,” cheetah linebacker Dasan McCullough told me Monday night after practice. “So during that bye week we were actually planning for UCF. We kind of moved on during that bye week. So I wouldn’t say that guys are stuck on Texas or anything like that. I haven’t heard one dude even speak about them. Honestly, if anything, I’ve been hearing dudes say scratch it out your mind completely. And it already feels like it was a while ago for me. I’m pretty much done talking about the first time we played Texas so we’re ready to move on.”

“First time we played Texas?” Does that imply that McCullough intrinsically believes the Sooners and Longhorns are destined to meet for a second time on Dec. 2 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington for the Big 12 championship?

If so, McCullough sees the Big 12 race like just about everyone has seen it — excluding Kansas, of course, and probably Oklahoma State and West Virginia and BYU and TCU. Those are the teams left on the Sooners’ schedule, and they absolutely won’t be conceding anything regardless of how well OU played against the Longhorns back in early October.

“For me, I take the same approach to every game,” cornerback Woodi Washington told me. “I would just say we haven’t performed as well as we should the last two games. We just have to pick it up.”

To his credit, Venables described a handful of scenarios over the past two weeks where the Sooners can definitely pick it up.

“I really believe, again, you're a couple of conversions away, one player away from stopping a sprint draw, and you get a three- or four-score win against UCF,” he said. “Didn't happen, but that's my perspective. It's not, 'Oh, we took them for granted.' Well, what happened the first four drives on defense with one of the best offenses in college football? Was there not a Texas hangover those first four drives?”

Those first four drives netted 3 total yards and zero first downs for the Knights. It couldn’t have been scripted any better. But then Gus Malzahn and the UCF offense started punching holes in the Oklahoma defense — holes that weren’t there before.

“And then what happened?” Venables continued. “Well there's one guy, all right? They they go down and they get him on the goal line and we knock their ass back for three straight plays. Did we still celebrate the Texas win those first three plays? And then we stopped them on the last one, but what happened? We had got a personal foul, a guy celebrating a little excessively. So I don't know.”

That was linebacker Jaren Kanak’s taunting penalty after a third-down stuff on that near-goal line stand. It gave the Knights a first and goal, and they punched it in. It’s been that way for Oklahoma since Dillon Gabriel’s last-minute pass to Nic Anderson won the Red River Rivalry — two steps forward, two steps back. Connected or not, much of the KU game looked a lot like much of the UCF game.

“I don't look at it that way,” Venables said. “At least not with this team. That's not what I see. I see each game presents its own issues and problems, and you try to correct them and learn from it and move onto the next one. Maybe I'm completely wrong. I might be. But that's how I've always approached (it). Like the old (saying), people say, ‘Well, you can't beat the same team twice in the season.’ That's baloney. That's not — what is that?

“Maybe outside the locker room, that’s the belief. But that’s not how people inside the locker room think. We don’t think like that. I’m just not going to go with — if I believe it’s true, I’ll say it. But you asked me and I don’t agree with that. Just because of the examples I gave you. When you lack attention to detail at times, when you lack the discipline it takes at times, this game will punish you if the other team has a pulse.

“Again, I got great respect for Kansas and what they’ve done. Their body of work has been really good. We jacked around and didn’t do the things you got to do to win a game. We still had opportunities to win the game all the way to the last play. And we didn’t. You learned a tough lesson. But I don’t think that had anything to do with Texas. I know that’s a popular thing, I’m sure, because of all the attention that that game had. But we’ve moved on from that game.”

There’s no doubt at this point the Sooners aren’t still hung over from anything that happened on Oct. 7. Those celebration days are definitely long gone.

But they still somehow snoozed through what should have been a wake-up call from UCF.

Will they also sleep right through the blaring alarms set off by KU and stumble through Saturday’s Bedlam finale at Oklahoma State?

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