What the Alamo Bowl Means to Oklahoma's Brent Venables and Arizona's Jedd Fisch

Arizona coach Jedd Fisch has spent much of his coaching career in the NFL, so he admits he doesn’t have a broad or extensive knowledge of Oklahoma football.

Well, there is that one, little thing.

“I do know Coach (Bob) Stoops,” Fisch said. “He introduced me to my wife in 2000 at the AFCA coaches convention. That's about the extent of my real experiences with Oklahoma. But I certainly have a ton of respect for them.”

And there’s the Sooners’ long, glorious heritage, which most football coaches learn like they learned the alphabet or arithmetic. Speaking of arithmetic …

“Oklahoma has won 10 games or more 19 of the last 23 years,” Fisch said. “We've won 10 games three times in a hundred years. So Oklahoma football, something I look up to.”

The Wildcats (9-3) and Sooners (10-2) meet on Dec. 28 in San Antonio. The game kicks off at 8:15 p.m. Although the Alamo Bowl isn’t in the echelon of College Football Playoff semifinal or New Year’s Six showcase, it’s widely regarded as among the best of the best on the next tier of bowl games, and this year’s rankings — OU is 12th, Arizona is 14th — bear that out.

It’s the third meeting between OU and UA, as they split a home-and-home series in 1988 and 1989.

The ’88 game in Norman was Barry Switzer’s next-to-last regular-season non-conference game. It was also the 400th game in OU program history. The Sooners scored once in each quarter to take a 28-10 victory, but it wasn’t easy. Arizona under Dick Tomey came in at 2-0 and led 3-0 early, and trailed just 14-10 at halftime. Jamelle Holieway ran for 75 yards and a touchdown and passed for 73 and another score, and also tossed an option pitch to Anthony Stafford for the final TD as OU compiled 352 total yards in the win.

The next year in Tucson went Arizona’s way, 6-3, in one of the all-time defensive slugfests. The OU program went from competing for a national championship in 1987 to complete disarray in 1989 as the NCAA slapped the Sooners with major infractions (20 total) in December and Switzer resigned in June following a series of felonies that wrecked the program for a decade. Gary Gibbs’ first big test as head coach was a dud as Arizona’s Doug Pfaff kicked a 40-yard field goal with two seconds left to topple the No. 6-ranked Sooners.

Meanwhile, Venables and Fisch have never crossed paths in their coaching careers.

“I’ve certainly admired him from afar and admired the defense that he's always put out there,” Fisch said. “You always know you're going to get an opportunistic defense. They lead the country in interceptions. You're going to get a defense that is going to be very hard to figure out their blitz patterns and their schemes. I have a ton of respect for him, for Oklahoma.”

While Oklahoma is playing its final game as a member of the Big 12 before the Sooners head off to the SEC, it’s also Arizona’s last go-round representing the Pac-12. Fisch knows winning a game in the Lone Star State would be a nice first step toward a future in the Big 12.

“In our transition from the Pac-12 to the Big 12, it's really important for us to start making more of a presence in Texas,” Fisch said. “If you look at our team, we have five players on our roster from Texas. We know that as the years progress, starting next year when we'll be playing in the Big 12, we're going to have to add more players from Texas into our program. We'll have more of a recruiting opportunity because of the fact that we'll be playing in the state against TCU and Baylor and Houston and Texas Tech.

“It will probably be a kickoff for us into the Big 12, this game, and really being able to see and show our players and let the state of Texas see the type of energy that our players play with, and hopefully the high school coaches in the state will be excited about sending their players to us.”

At an Alamo Bowl press conference on Thursday in San Antonio, both coaches were asked about their earliest bowl game memories. While Fisch recalled watching Penn State’s 1987 upset of No. 1 Miami in the Fiesta Bowl for the national championship at his grandparents’ house in Florida and said “I fell love with the game” and “the idea of one day dreaming to be able to coach in one of those games,” Venables’ recollection was a bit more personal: he was a student assistant coach under Snyder facing Boston College and Tom Coughlin in the Aloha Bowl in Hawaii.

“I just remember as the first bowl game being away from home for the first time at Christmas, calling on a pay phone — we didn't have cell phones — wanting to know what's going on back home,” Venables said.

“But the enrichment that you get out of every bowl game — I've been fortunate to be in a bowl game every year since — and all the memories that you have from a player standpoint. Nothing means more or nothing lasts longer, makes more of an imprint than winning the game. That's probably what you value the most in all those bowl games. But then now you fast forward, we're coaches and we're dads.

“It's funny to hear that fans have an interest in which bowl game we're going to go to. The players already have an incredibly vested interest in the bowl game. The coaches' kids have a vested interest in the play parks, the hotel, the pool, the weather, do we have a beach. Is it Orlando, San Antonio, River Walk? You get the thumbs up, the official approval from the coaches' kids.”

Both teams will spend Christmas in San Antonio. That’s normal for bowls played between the holidays. But in every bowl setting, players are largely sequestered for days at a time and have no academic responsibilities or outside distractions. It’s the single-greatest bonding opportunity for teams lucky enough (or good enough) to go to a postseason destination, and almost every bowl game has fun activities for the players that most of them have never experienced before. Some coaches have a hard time balancing the fun stuff with the work but, as Venables said, getting the win is what matters.

“They can have fun on the 29th,” Fisch said with a smile. “No, I always tell them — that was a Coach (Bill) Belichick line; Thanksgiving, Christmas, that happens in the spring.

“We'll do our best to make it an incredible experience. We only have eight players on our roster that have ever played in a bowl game. That's out of 110 players. All eight of them are transfers. This is a brand-new experience for a majority of our team. It's a brand new experience for our players.

"We want to make sure that our players understand it is a privilege to play in a bowl game. It is a celebration of a job well done. To be able to be at this bowl game, the Valero Alamo Bowl, this is a wonderful opportunity for our guys to experience San Antonio, to experience some of the great joys of being here, the history of the Alamo, to be able to learn a little bit about a new area. We're going to try to do our best to really show them the culture here the best we can.

“In the end, we're here to play a football game. We're here to play a football game against a team that has historically won seven national championships. We understand and recognize this great challenge. We're going to try to balance the challenge of competition with the balance of joy. During that time, hopefully we can get them both done.”

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