How Will Brent Venables Do After the Bye Week? History Suggests a Trend

Although Lincoln Riley struggled with winning games after open dates, Venables watched both Bob Stoops and Dabo Swinney successfully navigate the extra week of preparation.

Lincoln Riley never really figured them out as a head coach at Oklahoma.

Granted, navigating a college football teams open date — most prefer to call it the “bye week” — can be tricky.

Does more time off mean more practice? Extra film study? Additional meetings? Time for some further self-scouting?

Or less?

Would a team benefit more from actual down time — light, maintenance-type practices, a little weight training, a little cardio work, and a lot of time away from the facility?

Brent Venables tiptoes the line this week between too much and not enough. It’s his first bye week, and how he’s chosen to handle the team’s workload could go a long way toward determining how ready they are — mentally and physically — to play at Iowa State on Oct. 29.

Venables told AllSooners last week that this week’s schedule would consist of a light practice day Monday, a community service day Tuesday, a heavy, padded practice day Wednesday, another light day Thursday, and three days off before resuming the usual game week workload on Monday ahead of Iowa State.

Players have the weekend off.

Coming off a nice win over Kansas following two disastrous trips to the DFW Metroplex and a three-game losing streak, was it the right balance for this Oklahoma team?

Time will tell.

Every team’s makeup is different. So are their needs. Open dates fall at various points on the schedule. Injuries matter to the equation. So do mental and physical fatigue, which frequently drag all the way back to August.

Wins and losses aren’t an infallible determination of whether a team and a head coach are handling the bye week well or not. But in a zero-sum game like football, it’s all there is.

Given how well Bob Stoops handled open dates during his 18-year career — Stoops was 21-7 overall, Riley’s struggles always seemed odd.

In five seasons at OU, Riley’s teams faced seven open dates — that’s two full weeks to prepare for the next opponent — and posted a mediocre 4-3 record the week after.

Riley’s first career loss as a head coach, to Iowa State, came after an open date. The first loss of his final, fateful season, at Baylor, came after an open date.

Stoops’ teams won their first 10 games after an open date, then suffered a 5-6 skid from 2009 to 2014.

Venables was a big part of Stoops’ first 13 years at OU from 1999 to 2011, when the Sooners were 15-3 after an open date.

He was also a big part of the last decade at Clemson, where the Tigers were 12-1 after an open date from 2012 to 2021 — the only loss coming at Florida State the year after the Seminoles won the national championship.

Venables has the framework from which to draw. In his last 23 years as an assistant, his teams were 27-4 in regular season games with an extra week to prepare.

One common thread: Those early OU teams and those Clemson teams were the elite of the elite. It didn’t matter if they played before an open date, after an open date or somewhere in between, one week between games, two weeks or one month — they were likely going to prevail.

How Venables’ teams do after bye weeks may trend toward whether he’s got the more talented team, and how that team plays, than whether they practiced too much or not enough.