Brent Venables’ seat is heating up after embarrassing loss to Texas football
According to the Coaches Hot Seat Ranking from coacheshotseat.com, the seat for the Oklahoma Sooners head coach Brent Venables is heating up after the demolition that the team suffered over the weekend against Texas football. In the Red River Rivalry game on Oct. 8, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian saw his team down new head coach Venables and the Sooners by the dominant final score of 49-0.
This led to the Sooners suffering the worst shutout loss in program history. And the Longhorns got the largest margin of victory for them in Red River history.
It goes without saying how big this win could be for Sark and the Longhorns moving forward.
But this game is also a potential turning point for Venables and the Sooners in the worst of ways. Oklahoma has now started out Big 12 play with three straight losses, which is the first time in program history this has occurred.
To make matters worse, the Sooners have suffered three straight double-digit losses, which came by a combined margin of a whopping 88 points. The issues that the Sooners are facing right now are all over the place.
The quarterback situation looks bleak, and the defense is not playing well to say the very least, which is tough considering Venables was known as a defensive-minded coach coming into Norman after getting this job during the offseason.
Hot Seat Ranking pegs Brent Venables in the top 3 after embarrassing loss to Texas football in Red River
Saturday at the Cotton Bowl wasn’t a bad game. It was one of the lowest moments in the history of Oklahoma football.
— Shehan Jeyarajah (@ShehanJeyarajah) October 8, 2022
I tried to make sense of where Oklahoma goes from here after the Red River Shutout. https://t.co/aJIGwmLv21
Realistically, this was always going to be a tough transition year for OU.
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) October 8, 2022
But the fact it's been this ugly + Riley doing well at USC + Heupel doing well at Tennessee makes this just an absolute nightmare first year so far for Brent Venables.
Venables was obviously liable to face plenty of criticism following the loss to Texas. The media surely had a lot to say regarding the state of the Oklahoma program in the first year under Venables coming out of Red River last weekend.
Yet, the Hot Seat Ranking listing Venables in the top three among the coaches with the most pressure on them at the moment was pretty surprising to me. This Hot Seat Ranking currently pegs Venables as the head coach on the third hottest seat in the FBS only behind South Florida’s Jeff Scott and Stanford’s David Shaw.
I do want to say that I personally don’t feel like Venables is in a spot to get fired by OU at any point this fall unless something really scathing were to happen off the field. And if OU is able to show any semblance of life in Big 12 play when redshirt junior quarterback Dillon Gabriel returns from injury this fall, that should help stave off the hot seat conversation for good for Venables at least until 2023.
Moreover, the fact that we’re even having the hot-seat conversation in some regard for Venables and the Sooners this early in his tenure is pretty crazy. He’s barely a half-dozen games into his tenure as OU’s head coach and the program is already reaching some new lows in conference play, especially after Red River.
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Following the win over Oklahoma in Red River on Oct. 8, Texas is sporting a record of 4-2 (2-1 Big 12). Meanwhile, Oklahoma is now sitting on a three-game losing streak with a record of 3-3 (0-3 Big 12) coming out of the weekend.