Oklahoma’s Brent Venables on Playoff Push: “Improve and Win These Last Few Weeks”

The Oklahoma Sooners sit at 12th in the initial College Football Playoff rankings. They're behind the Texas Longhorns at 11, Ole Miss, who defeated OU two weeks ago, at 6th, and have a road date with No. 4 Alabama on November 15.

Due to conference championship tie-ins, if the playoff began today, both OU and Texas would be on the outside looking in.

But the playoff doesn't begin today. Oklahoma has plenty of opportunities ahead of them with Alabama, Missouri and Louisiana State University to round out their schedule.

Thanks to that slate of opponents, the Sooners' largest talking point will be its strength of schedule. Per ESPN's strength of schedule metric, OU has the 12th most difficult schedule in the country — fourth in the SEC behind Texas, Georgia and Alabama.

Oklahoma Sooners, Brent Venables — Oklahoma coach Brent Venables | Carson Field, Sooners On SI

During his weekly teleconference, Brent Venables was asked about how OU's strength of schedule will influence their potential run to a playoff berth. As always, Venables attempted to shut out any outside noise and focus in-house.

"I do think that the strength of schedule component is incredibly important," Venables said. "Other than that, I know from past experience the number one way you position yourself in the strongest way is to improve and get better and win when it comes these last few weeks.

That's where our focus is," Venables added. "Focus on the things that we can control, how we play and how we practice."

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Venables' reasoning makes sense. With the current No. 4 and No. 22 (Missouri) remaining on the schedule, if the Sooners continue to improve on their previous three weeks and get better, they'll have opportunities to win. If they do win, their résumé will be hard to ignore.

The College Football Playoff Committee added the metric they refer as "record strength" for the 2025 season. Baked into their metric is something they refer to as "cumulative sum of scores" that they will use when splitting hairs between similar résumés.

Venables chose not to get too far in the weeds into the future but understood that coaches may be encouraged to chase style points if given the opportunity.

"Sounds pretty complicated in some ways," Venables said when asked if coaches are being encouraged to run up the score based on the "cumulative sum of scores" metric. "If that's going to be a real factor, then yeah, I'm sure that'll impact a few of those games down the stretch, and how coaches call plays and what-not."