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How Oklahoma's Brent Venables Has Begun to Bridge a Long-Standing Gap

Building relationships with faculty and inviting them into the team experience serves student-athletes and will enrich the OU academic community's view of the football team.
John E. Hoover|
How Oklahoma's Brent Venables Has Begun to Bridge a Long-Standing Gap
How Oklahoma's Brent Venables Has Begun to Bridge a Long-Standing Gap

WICHITA, KS – When Brent Venables talks about a holistic approach to Oklahoma football, he’s not just talking about the players.

The Sooners’ new boss hasn’t coached a game yet, but he’s already winning the hearts and minds of some of the toughest nuts on campus: the faculty.

For much of the last seven decades, high-level football and academics haven't exactly seen eye to eye. In fact, they've often been adversarial – at times, it seemed, almost exclusive of each other. There are countless exceptions, of course, but tales are plentiful of professors and coaches butting heads over the time management of their student-athletes.

Venables has employed some innovative tactics to try to bridge that gap.

Under the SOUL Mission umbrella, Venables’ players have continued mission work (they recently got back from Miami) and community outreach (they worked with Meals on Wheels of Norman) and also completed micro-internships (headed by Caleb Kelly) that put them in a week-long work environment and “broken the barrier into adulthood,” according to Kelly on Twitter last week.

But closer to campus, football players are either striking up or building on relationships that were previously strictly academic.

Those relationships are certainly kinder and gentler in 2022 than they used to be. The proliferation of academic-athletic liaisons at universities nationwide over the past 20-25 years has done much to fill the chasm. Facilitating an athlete's ability to work hand-in-hand with faculty and administration and still compete at a high level for their coaches has long been one of athletic director Joe Castiglione's broader goals.

But Venables has taken those efforts to a new level.

Venables revealed at last week’s Sooner Caravan stop in Wichita that every player invited one professor to spend a day with the football team during spring practice. The professor sat in on position meetings “and learned a very complex language,” Venables said, then attended a practice, then shadowed the player through more meetings and other work before attending a dinner to honor all the student-athletes with a 3.0 GPA or higher.

The idea, Venables said, is to “have the professor go and watch their student prepare and work and respond to a lot of adversity and whatnot in practice, and then just come and break bread together – get a change of perspective. But the biggest thing for me is to let the professors and the educators on our campus know how much we value what it is that they do.”

A former student-athlete himself as a linebacker at Kansas State, Venables has been either teaching the position or coordinating a defense for the last 30 years. Now that he’s a head coach – the CEO of a major college football program, responsible for so much more than just football – he’s applying what he’s learned through the years to put his own stamp on the OU program.

Nurturing relationships between players and faculty is high on his list, Venables said, because of the vital role faculty plays in the student-athlete’s overall growth process.

Another way Venables wants to make this happen is by having the academic support staff choose two professors each week during the season to become a part of the team’s immersive weekend experience.

“We’ll have two professors travel with us every single week,” Venables said. “They’ll go to the hotel, they’ll go to the movie the night before, they’ll go to the dinners, they’ll go to the meetings. I want them to have a different perspective and a different appreciation for what it is our players go through.

“Because I know they're gonna leave that experience, they’re gonna go back into the university, and they’re gonna talk. And I want them to be proud of what the players and the coaches are doing to represent the university the right way.”

There’s more ahead, Venables said. In fact, the innovation never stops. Venables wants to build champions in life just like he wants to build champions in football.

“We’re focused on giving them a worldly experience,” Venables said. “Next summer we’re trying to go (on a mission trip) to South Africa. It can’t be ball just 24/7. It’s dysfunctional if it is. So, just having balance.

“We want to attract people for the long haul.”

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John E. Hoover
JOHN E. HOOVER

John is an award-winning journalist whose work spans five decades in Oklahoma, with multiple state, regional and national awards as a sportswriter at various newspapers. During his newspaper career, John covered the Dallas Cowboys, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Oklahoma Sooners, the Oklahoma State Cowboys, the Arkansas Razorbacks and much more. In 2016, John changed careers, migrating into radio and launching a YouTube channel, and has built a successful independent media company, DanCam Media. From there, John has written under the banners of Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Fan Nation and a handful of local and national magazines while hosting daily sports talk radio shows in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and statewide. John has also spoken on Capitol Hill in Oklahoma City in a successful effort to put more certified athletic trainers in Oklahoma public high schools. Among the dozens of awards he has won, John most cherishes his national "Beat Writer of the Year" from the Associated Press Sports Editors, Oklahoma's "Best Sports Column" from the Society of Professional Journalists, and Two "Excellence in Sports Medicine Reporting" Awards from the National Athletic Trainers Association. John holds a bachelor's degree in Mass Communications from East Central University in Ada, OK. Born and raised in North Pole, Alaska, John played football and wrote for the school paper at Ada High School in Ada, OK. He enjoys books, movies and travel, and lives in Broken Arrow, OK, with his wife and two kids.

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