At Oklahoma – before Saturday’s latest embarrassment, anyway – they’d blame the injuries in the wide receiver room. They’d talk about how well recruiting has gone this year. They’d point out all the little problems that weren’t Brent Venables’ fault in his first couple years on the job and how he was still the right guy to fix them as the Sooners transition to the Southeastern Conference.
It’s why Oklahoma, for some reason, gave Venables a new contract with a $44.8 million buyout after last season even though it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which he’d have left Norman or even been a legitimate candidate for any other job. It’s why the Sooners went all-in: They believed they had the right guy to lead their program into the toughest neighborhood in college football.
How’s that going now?
The Sooners’ 35-9 loss to South Carolina – in Norman, no less – represents one of the lowest points in the last quarter century of Oklahoma football. And that may be an overly kind way to frame what’s happened this season, as the Sooners are 4-3 with a remaining schedule that suggests they’ll be lucky to reach a bowl game.
This isn’t what Oklahoma football is about, whether it’s in the Big 12 or SEC. Regardless of the circumstance, there’s are no excuses. This is really, really bad.
Venables, 53, was a Hall of Fame-level defensive coordinator at both Oklahoma and Clemson but never made the leap into the head coaching realm. And he may have remained Dabo Swinney’s top lieutenant were it not for Lincoln Riley making the shocking move to Southern California after the 2021 regular season.
Caught a bit off-guard by Riley’s departure, Oklahoma didn’t have a lot of obvious places to turn. But Venables made sense: He had proven himself as a two-time national champion at Clemson and understood what it took for the Sooners to succeed, having been on Bob Stoops’ staff from 1999-2011.
The only question mark was whether his skills as an assistant would translate to the head coaching chair. And right now, as Oklahoma fans process one of the worst performances they can remember in the modern era, it’s a legitimate worry.
Venables has improved the Sooners’ defense, as you would expect him to do in Year 3. But the offense has taken a nosedive, ranking in the 100s nationally in an alarming number of statistical categories.
Yes, the Sooners have had some injuries. But at some point, the blame for fielding one of the worst offenses in college football must fall on Venables and coordinator Seth Littrell. This isn’t Little Sisters of the Poor. It’s freaking Oklahoma.
Whether it was Jackson Arnold to start the season at quarterback, freshman Michael Hawkins for the last few weeks, or Arnold subbing in Saturday, getting blasted by South Carolina is unacceptable.
“We’re all falling incredibly short right now,” Venables told the media.
It would be irresponsible for the Oklahoma administration not to consider all options after watching their team lose this badly to South Carolina and Shane Beamer, who coached tight ends for the Sooners from 2018-2020.
Yes, Venables’ buyout is prohibitive. And you want to give a coach his fair opportunity, which has been complicated in this case by bad injury luck and the move to a much tougher conference than any Sooners coach has ever had to deal with. But this is going to likely be the worst Oklahoma football season since 1998, which is not a milestone to ignore.
The most likely move is to nudge Venables into an offensive coordinator change, which will be the make-or-break decision of his tenure. But Oklahoma fans have seen enough good football to know what their eyes are telling them: This program has been driven into the ditch, and Venables may not be capable of pulling them out.
That’s why the Sooners are No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst.
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Four more in misery
Florida State: The utter collapse of the Seminoles from the brink of a national championship to forgetting how to win any football games will be studied for generations. Think about it. Florida State was 13-0 just 10 months ago, denied a shot at the College Football Playoff only because quarterback Jordan Travis suffered a gruesome injury late in the season. Now they are 1-6 after a 23-16 loss at Duke, and fans are rightly questioning everything from roster construction to the mental approach Florida State took into this offseason after the CFP snub.
When you lose to Duke for the first time after 22 consecutive wins, that comes with the territory. But the concerns about Florida State are deeper than one game. Mike Norvell, the Seminoles’ 43-year old head coach, weathered two losing seasons before getting things turned around in 2022 and 2023. Now they’re back to square one as the most disappointing team in the country, and Norvell’s $63.8 million buyout means there is no choice but to have faith that he can course correct once again.
Alabama: It must be awkward to be Kalen DeBoer, knowing that you not only signed up to replace Nick Saban but to live in a world where he’s asked to give his opinion on your program several times a week for his television job while also maintaining an office in the Alabama football building.
It’s an entirely unfair scenario, but at least the Alabama fan base is known for being reasonable and understanding.
Ha! Just kidding. This is the most demanding, unrealistic and spoiled group of people in all of sports, and their ire is going to be directed entirely at DeBoer, whose Alabama record is now 5-2 after a 24-17 loss to Tennessee.
Before he retired from coaching, Saban’s two-loss seasons were cause to question whether he’d lost a step – and that was after he won six national titles. If DeBoer wonders how Alabama fans are going to digest his two-loss seasons, he will get a pretty good idea by tuning into the Paul Finebaum Show on Monday: Not very well.
Yes, it was completely unrealistic to expect Saban’s replacement to be as good as Saban. But that’s what the Alabama job is, and DeBoer was warned about it before leaving a lucrative and low-key life at Washington.
Saban’s prominence on ESPN only makes it more uncomfortable for Alabama to be just another pretty good team in the SEC rather than the juggernaut it has been for the last 15 years. Maybe DeBoer will make it to the other side of this transition with his reputation and ego intact, but right now he looks like the sacrificial lamb for a fan base that knows its team isn’t scary, much less very good.
Southern California: It took until Lincoln Riley’s fifth season at Oklahoma to suffer his ninth loss, and his 55-10 overall record is one of the more remarkable starts to any coaching career in the history of the sport. He simply didn’t lose very often.
That’s why USC paid him a boatload of money to revive the Trojans. Their administration believed Riley was a special coaching talent whose offense would not only light up the scoreboard but reset the recruiting landscape of Southern California that had begun to see a bleed of talent to far-off teams and conferences.
And Riley got off to a decent enough start, largely because quarterback Caleb Williams followed him from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, immediately won a Heisman Trophy and then became the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft.
But this has been a season of change for Riley: A new conference, a new quarterback, new results and new criticisms. Not only has he lost nine of his last 14 games – a number that nearly matches the how many losses he had in 65 games coached at Oklahoma – but USC can’t seem to figure out how to win against anyone in the Big Ten.
Saturday’s 29-28 loss at Maryland is about as bad as it gets, especially after the game turned on a blocked 41-yard field goal with two minutes left that would have put USC up 31-22. On one hand, USC’s 1-4 Big Ten record (3-4 overall) could easily be 5-0 with a handful of plays and a little luck. On the other hand, how do you convince USC fans that you’re still a quality program when you aren’t able to beat teams like Maryland and Minnesota that have significantly less talent? This is truly one of the more stunning turns in a coaching career we’ve ever seen.
Auburn: All you need to know about Hugh Freeze’s confidence in his offense became self-evident with fewer than six minutes to go at Missouri. Auburn, holding a 17-14 lead, had just gotten a big stop and returned a punt to Missouri’s 37-yard line. If Auburn scores a touchdown, the game is basically over.
Past iterations of Freeze’s offense at Ole Miss and Liberty would have immediately gone for the kill shot. Instead, he went into turtle mode: A handoff for a 2-yard loss, a quarterback keeper for a 1-yard loss and a throwaway play on third-and-long that gave Auburn no chance to get back into scoring position. And Auburn paid the price, as Missouri drove 95 yards in 17 plays for a touchdown and a 21-17 victory.
Freeze’s caution in that moment may have been warranted: Quarterback Payton Thorne has struggled for most of this season, and completed just 17 of 29 passes for 176 yards against Missouri. But the bottom line is that Freeze is 8-12 at Auburn and 3-9 in the SEC, and he has had ample opportunity to either help Thorne improve or replace him with someone better. Bryan Harsin, who proved to be a complete mismatch for the Auburn job, was fired after going 9-12 and 4-9 in the SEC.
Even though Freeze will likely get at least one more year to turn this around, Auburn fans have every right to wonder why someone who has done worse than his predecessor on the field is going to get a longer leash.
Miserable but not miserable enough
Nebraska: You can only say so much when a proud program with an incredible history loses by 49 points to a program whose only purpose for most of its history was to fill time before basketball season. But Indiana, this season, is a legitimate 7-0 team with a real chance to make the College Football Playoff. Nebraska is a 5-2 team whose 56-7 defeat was so humbling that Matt Rhule’s second year is no longer a pressure-free, feel-good operation. The Huskers committed five turnovers and went 0-for-5 on fourth down, but the only story is that they were outclassed in every area by first-year Indiana coach in Curt Cignetti and an Indiana team that went 3-9 last season. Nebraska may be making progress in the big picture, but this was a huge setback.
Arizona State: It has been a good turnaround season for the 5-2 Sun Devils, but coach Kenny Dillingham was so angered over 24-14 loss to Cincinnati that he said after the game Arizona State would be holding campus tryouts on Monday for a new kicker. The frustration largely stemmed from Ian Hershey missing a 48-yarder with 6:01 left and a 41-yarder with 30 seconds left. But what are the odds that a regular student, even on a campus with 65,000 undergrads, can do better than someone Dillingham’s staff could have gotten on scholarship?
Michigan: The reigning national champions have a huge quarterback problem. They started the season with Davis Warren, turned the offense over to Alex Orji and now have settled on Jack Tuttle. As the old adage goes, if you have three quarterbacks, you have none. And Michigan’s 21-7 loss at Illinois, in which the Wolverines got smacked around despite allowing just 267 yards of offense, suggests that first-year coach Sherrone Moore is paralyzed by indecision over what direction to take this team. Not that it matters much. Michigan is 4-3 and will be fortunate to get to 6-6 with an offense that ranks well outside the top 100 nationally. Winning the big trophy last year makes it all worthwhile, of course, but it’s very clear that this program will struggle for a while to recover from Jim Harbaugh’s departure to the NFL.
Florida International: When you play in a stadium sponsored by Pitbull, the fans should be having the Time of Our Lives. But the moment you say Don’t Stop the Party, 0-6 UTEP shows up on the schedule. Apparently nobody in the Panthers’ locker room yelled Timber because they lost 30-21, giving the Miners their first win of the year. Mike MacIntyre, FIU’s veteran coach, is undoubtedly going to Feel This Moment now that his record has slipped to 10-21. But should FIU think about making a change, MacIntyre and his agent will demand that the school Give Me Everything he’s due in that contract – which in this case is a $1.14 million buyout. Is there any International Love left at FIU?
(This story was updated to change a video.)
This post appeared first on USA TODAY
