Oklahoma extend Brent Venables Earlier could come back to haunt them later

Since when does going 16-10 over a two-year stretch deserve a six-year extension to continue running Oklahoma football? This is the situation we are currently in with Brent Venables in Norman. Seeing as OU athletic director Joe Castiglione can do no wrong, he’s giving the Sooners’ head coach a six-year extension. Has yet to coach a game in the SEC…

While last year was better than two years ago, that’s probably a lot of money to give Venables ahead of a season with so many unknowns. If the Sooners were to stay in the Big 12, I would be more in favor of this move. This is because Oklahoma has historically been the best program in that league. This was a top-three program all-time, but the whole dynamic changed with OU joining the SEC.

Oklahoma will go from atop its league with Texas to likely looking at the likes of Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss, Missouri, LSU and, unfortunately, Texas entering its first SEC season. The Sooners are right up there with Tennessee, hoping teams like Texas A&M, Kentucky and Auburn that have no chance of making the extended College Football Playoff out of their reach.

I get the bona fide extension from Castiglione, but the man feels largely unchallenged here.

Castiglione has been Oklahoma’s athletic director since 1998 and the one who hired Bob Stoops…

To me, it feels like a handful of things coming together at the same time. It has little to do with how well Oklahoma performed last year, something to do with the program’s recruiting efforts and everything to do with arch-rival Texas. The Longhorns won the Big 12 last year and are on a short list of four or five teams that can realistically win the national title in 2024. Steve Sarkisian holds big…

As a defensive mind and recruiter, I will never have a problem with Venables. He is the best assistant to ever work under Dabo Swinney. Granted, most of them have been deplorably bad as head coaches in college football, but last year’s 10-win season at OU is apparently nothing to sneeze at. I wonder if Oklahoma made a big mistake. On the other hand, the state was not founded on patience.

The entire Sooner moniker and moniker has everything to do with the premature departure during the Land Run of 1889. Fast forward a century and 34 years later, and some things never change. In all that time, Castiglione has been at the helm of the state’s flagship universities athletic department for nearly a fifth of that time. 26 years of service must mean serving in the United States Congress.

While I applaud Castiglione for being bold here, there are plenty of ways this could backfire.