Oklahoma Opens Bye Week With a Servant's Heart, Rested Bodies and Healthy Minds

College football bye weeks just ain’t what they used to be.

Oklahoma coach Brent Venables came to that full realization a couple weeks ago when he was looking through some old notes — from 1998, when he was Bill Snyder’s linebackers coach at Kansas State — and put it in perspective with how he’s approaching the Sooners’ open date this week.

“I think years and years ago, you practiced like it was a game week,” Venables said on Monday night. “Because football’s year-round now.

“I looked at the summer program and we were proud we had like 38 players that had like 30 workouts for the summer. Summer’s like 10 weeks — 30 workouts, you just do the math. We were proud that half the team did about three quarters of those days.”

Nowadays, of course, players with that kind of summer participation rate would never see the field in the fall. In 2023 — and really, for most of the last two decades — summer workouts became much less “optional,” regardless of what the NCAA rules said.

“Back in the day, people went home, they had jobs. The accountability wasn’t there. You couldn’t make them be there,” Venables said. “Most guys didn’t do summer school. So everything’s changed.”

It’s a similar attitude toward bye weeks, or open dates.

For example, during the Bob Stoops era, players would take Sunday off, practice light on Monday, practice hard Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, then be completely off and reconvene Sunday night. Some would just recharge in Norman, but many would go home for the weekend and spend time with their families.

That still happens, but it’s less prominent. Now, because players are committed to fitness and nutrition throughout the year, it’s not a setback if they take a few days off during the bye week. So practices are less intense — more fundamentals, refreshers, maintenance and maybe a look ahead to the upcoming opponents.

“Because the calender year, you start sooner, you finish later, and you do keep them on campus year-round,” Venables said. “You want to be smart about letting them recharge and refocus, renew their mind, their spirit, their bodies, at the same time get work done — fundamentally, scheme, look ahead a little bit.”

This generation of college football players also plays the sport with a servant’s heart. So OU spent most of the day Tuesday performing a massive community-service project for Oklahoma kids in foster care.

“We’re gonna make a bunch of bunk beds for foster children here in the state,” Venables said Monday. “There’s a law that every foster child, in order to stay in a home, has to have their own bed. So we’re gonna make over 200 beds (Tuesday) as a team and have some fun and give back.

“Then we’re gonna practice Wednesday, then practice briefly on Thursday, then give them the weekend off. Much-deserved for these guys.”

“This is a bye week, but it’s not a rest week,” said left tackle Walter Rouse. “We’re still going hard, we’re being mentally focused, we’re doing all of that. We really have like two weeks to get ready for UCF. That’s how I’m looking at it. We’ve still got to go 1-0 this week. Like if I go eat McDonald’s every day until next week, that’s not really being on top of my stuff, and I ain’t really going 1-0. So we’ve got to make sure we go 1-0 each week, including the bye week.”