Watch: Brent Venables Gives His Recruiting Pitch on SEC Now
Despite going 6-7 in his first season in Norman, Brent Venables has things rolling at Oklahoma as he prepares his program to make the jump to the SEC in 2024.
This season, the Sooners fell just shy of the Big 12 Championship game with a 10-2 record and the No. 12 ranking in the final College Football Playoff Top 25. They’ll get a chance to finish with 11 wins against a good Arizona team next week in the Alamo Bowl, but OU is just as concerned with winning on the recruiting trail right now as they are in San Antonio.
Wednesday was Early Signing Day, and the Sooners saw 27 players from high schools all over the country. As things stand now, Oklahoma has the No. 6 class in the country (per Rivals), their 18 four-star signees trailing only Georgia (20) and Oregon (19) for the most of any school nationally.
Oklahoma has been a recruiting power for a long time now, but the consistency with which OU has recruited under Venables is profound, finishing 8th in a chaotic 2022 class after Lincoln Riley left, 6th in his true first recruiting class, and ranks 6th once again in 2024.
Clearly, something Venables is selling is resonating with recruits and their families. On Wednesday, the crew on ESPN’s SEC Now asked the Sooners’ head coach to give them his pitch, and as it turns out, the guy might know a thing or two about how football players work, both on and off the field.
Now that’s quite a pitch.
Being a player and coach who’s been around a locker room for almost 30 years certainly gives Venables plenty of credibility with the players he’s chasing on the recruiting trail. However, his genuineness is what separates Venables from the others.
He is the same person, day in and day out. Relentless, intense, and passionate. That’s the kind of guy that Oklahoma has needed, and now it appears they’ve got him. Add to that the fact that his priorities are in the right order, with an emphasis being placed on developing men, not just football players, and you’ve got the kind of coach that parents feel good about, which is vital when they’ll be trusting you with their sons for the next three to four years.
Oklahoma seems to be trending up on its way into the SEC, and after listening to their head coach make his recruiting pitch, it’s not hard to understand why that’s the case.
