Oklahoma-Temple Preview: One Big Thing - OU's Recent Record Is Awful After a Big Win

One question that Oklahoma coach Brent Venables has gotten plenty this week was about how his team responded to success in 2023 after unexpectedly beating Texas.

That is especially germane this week as the Sooners are trying to put last week’s 24-13 win over Michigan in the past as quickly as possible as they hit the road for the first time to meet Temple on Saturday morning.

Quarterback John Mateer said Saturday night that Venables brought up that win over Texas — and how the team didn’t respond to success — after beating the Wolverines.

But the scope of the question shouldn’t just cover that memorable last-second takedown of the Longhorns.

Now in his fourth season, each one of Venables’ teams — 2022, 2023, 2024 and now 2025 — scored a massive regular-season victory.

And after each of the first three wins, the Sooners struggled mightily in the coming weeks.

In ’22, in his third game as a head coach, Venables took an emotional OU squad to Lincoln and they crushed Nebraska 49-14.

In ’23, Dillon Gabriel, Danny Stutsman and another emotion-soaked Sooner roster outlasted the Horns 34-30.

In ’24, with two weeks to stew over a shockingly toxic loss at Missouri, Oklahoma came out and played its best game of the year and dominated Alabama from kick to gun.

It’s ’25 now, and this Oklahoma team is seven days removed from an historic clash with Michigan. It was matchup of football royalty, with ESPN’s “College GameDay” on scene, and a national television broadcast delivered a memorable heavyweight throwdown.

Now, the Sooners are in Philadelphia, awaiting the best that Temple can offer.

OU is a 21 1/2-point favorite, according to FanDuel SportsBook. Win and No. 13-ranked Oklahoma improves to 3-0 on the season. On to the SEC. Bring on Auburn.

But a 12-game college football season isn’t ever that linear. There are ebbs and flows. There are emotional peaks and valleys. Coaches can steam up fast, and players can quickly turn ice cold.

As evidence, just examine how Venables’ teams have responded after each of their biggest wins over the past three seasons.

Following that win at Nebraska, the Sooners lost their next three games: 41-34 to Kansas State, 55-24 to TCU and 49-0 to Texas.

Extenuating circumstances? Sure. Gabriel went down midway through the TCU game, and the Sooner coaching staff didn’t have a backup plan either that day in Fort Worth or seven days later in Dallas. OU started that season 3-0, then lost seven of their last 10 to finish 6-7.

Following that win over Texas, the Sooners were 6-0, but had to hold off a 2-point conversion play at home against four-touchdown underdog UCF to survive the following week and improve to 7-0. But then came the implosion: turnovers, egregious player mistakes and massive coaching blunders stole what should have been OU victories in both Lawrence and Stillwater. OU played .500 ball the rest of the way as the 7-0 start became a 10-3 finish.

Extenuating circumstances? Not this time. Venables decries the avalanche of turnovers in those three losses — six against KU and OSU, six more in the bowl loss — as a mitigating factor, but turnovers don’t happen in a vacuum. Aren’t careless mistakes often a reflection how players prepared or even just paid attention in practice that week? Or perhaps a measure of how much the coaches’ unending message about ball security just didn’t get through? A bad week of preparation often leads to a bad week in the game.

And following that epic win over Alabama last season, Oklahoma played one of its worst games of the season, trampled by an unranked LSU team in Baton Rouge 37-17. Then came a middling bowl defeat at the hands of Navy.

So, add it all up and what do you have?

The Sooners are 1-8 in games played within roughly a month of a big, huge, emotional regular-season win.

One win. Eight losses. That’s a trend — and a bad one.

Everybody loves a big win. But the Sooners have developed this bad habit of following those wins ... with losses.

If you beat Nebraska, Texas, Alabama and Michigan in four consecutive seasons, your record should be better than 1-8 in the weeks that follow.

“It’s just handling success,” Venables said in this week’s press conference. “It’s staying hungry, staying motivated, staying detailed, staying committed to a process in how you play well. I’ve always felt it’s harder to manage a team that’s doing really well, as opposed to a team that doesn’t think much of themselves.

“So it’s just right on cue with what we try to prepare the team for. ‘Come out here and you beat Michigan, everybody’s going to want to interview you, they’re going talk Heisman, they’re going to talk best defense ever, all these things that come with that. You gotta be able to block out the noise before, and you gotta block it out now.

“Not an easy thing to do, because I think human nature is, people enjoy somebody saying nice things about ‘em. Doesn’t help us win. Doesn’t help us in our process and how we gotta start completely over, learn new DNA and do the things that winning requires and success requires, and that’s go right back to work and focus on what’s in front of us.”

Maybe Venables in Year 4 has learned how to handle success as a head coach. Maybe this year’s team has the right assistant coaches in place, like Ben Arbuckle and Kevin Wilson and Nate Dreiling and Wes Goodwin. Maybe, in Mateer, there’s a stronger presence of leadership at quarterback. Maybe this year’s team finally stays healthy.

Or maybe the 14 current players who were on the 2022 team that dominated the Cornhuskers in Lincoln — and enjoyed a similar high each of the next two seasons, only to also endure a significant crash after each win — are mature enough now to not let such a letdown happen again.

As Venables said, we’ll see.

“I do feel like (the message) resonated,” he said, “but time will tell.”