Oklahoma HC Brent Venables on Playing Friday Night Opener: ‘No Perfect way to do it’

NORMAN — Week 1 of OU’s 2026 season lines up with the first week of the Oklahoma high school football season.

The Sooners will kick off this year’s campaign against UTEP on Friday, the same night that dozens of high schools play their first games of 2026.

As a result, countless high school football players, coaches, parents and others will be forced to miss the first OU game of the season.

Oklahoma coach Brent Venables recognizes that the conflict isn’t ideal.

“There is no perfect way to do it,” Venables said.

Venables also said that he and his staff had to do “what’s best” for the team — and there is strong reasoning behind his thinking.

The Sooners and Miners were initially slated to battle on Saturday evening before OU announced that it had moved the game to Friday.

As a result of the postponement, Oklahoma will now have eight days in between the UTEP game and its game against Michigan on Sept. 12. The move gives the Sooners an extra day of rest before they have to travel across the country to face the Wolverines.

“There are some layers to it,” Venables said.

Oklahoma has hosted seven regular-season contests on Fridays throughout its history, and five of those were afternoon tilts against Nebraska. The Sooners also closed their 2023 regular season against TCU on a Friday, with an 11 a.m. kickoff.

This week’s showdown against UTEP will be only the second regular-season Friday night game. In 2024, OU opened its season against Temple on a Friday evening.

The Sooners are now two days away from their second regular-season Friday game in three years. But Venables doesn’t want these contests — which conflict with high school football — to become the norm.

“Hopefully, that is not going to be something about who we are from one year to the next,” Venables said. “I don’t think it will be a part of who we are moving forward.”

The main message that Venables wants to convey to anyone associated with Oklahoma high school football? It is still important to him and his staff.

“We certainly value high school football, and the purity of it and what it means to so many people,” Venables said. “This is just a unique moment is how I look at it. Not ideal, certainly understand the dilemma, maybe it’s work, maybe it’s the family you have playing high school football and whatnot.”

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