Oklahoma-Alabama Preview Column: One Big Thing — Brent Venables Deserves Your Grace

The Sooners' head coach has had a tough go of it on the football field, but it's nothing compared to what he and his family are dealing with at home.

Julie Venables (center) and family laugh at a remark from her husband, new OU football coach Brent Venables, on Monday in the Everest Training Center in Norman. / DOUG HOKE/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK

NORMAN — The Brent Venables experience comes with a lot of narratives.

Venables is a good person. Venables is a great defensive mind. Venables is a dynamic recruiter. Venables just isn’t head coach material. Venables isn’t a CEO-type. Venables is in over his head.

Some of those are immutably true. Some of those haven’t proven true yet. Some haven’t proven false yet.

This week has reminded everyone of another Venables narrative that is, without a doubt, the iron clad truth: 

Brent Venables deserves our grace.

Whether you’re a frustrated Joe Castiglione or an infuriated Joe Sixpack, a confused Jackson Arnold or a scared Kevin Sperry, Brent Venables deserves your grace.

Oklahoma hosts No. 7-ranked Alabama on Saturday night, and if this were a professional fight, the boxing commission might refuse to sanction it. These two teams do not look the same at the weigh-in. The tale of the tape is decidedly one-sided.

Oklahoma — now 1-5 in Southeastern Conference play heading into its showdown with the Crimson Tide — stepped into the SEC ring still looking like a Big 12 bantamweight. Now the Sooners are in the corner, already staggered from previous fights, and they’re just waiting to hear the bell.

Alabama is a two-touchdown favorite, and if the Sooners don’t play significantly better football than they did their last time out, they’ll get routed.

After that, Venables will have one more chance to get his team to .500 on the season, to qualify them for a bowl game, and he’ll have to do that not in a heavyweight boxing ring, but in a snake pit known as LSU’s Tiger Stadium — again, a very tall task for this Oklahoma ballclub.

But even if OU gets beaten twice these next two Saturdays — even if Venables ends Year 3 with his second losing record, even if his career head-coaching mark falls to 21-17 overall and 11-15 in conference games, even if OU drops out off the postseason picture for the first time since 1998 — Venables deserves our grace.

The man has already endured more than any human should, as his lovely wife of 27 years, Julie, has been battling breast cancer for nearly two years.

Brent and Julie have two sons, Jake and Tyler, and two daughters, Laney and Addie — and they’re all terrified. And the six of them absolutely deserve your grace.

Football is big. Certainly, OU football is its own mountain. But cancer is bigger.

If even the most fervent, most myopic, most unrealistic citizens of Sooner Nation will be honest with themselves for a moment, they’ll admit that Venables has handled this whole thing — OU football, losing games, the SEC, having no wide receivers, playing without a legit offensive line, a son playing his final season at Clemson, a wife grappling with breast cancer — better than they ever could. Better than any of us could.

Given the scope of everything, Venables' performance in 2024 has been beyond admirable.

In a few days, Venables will announce his choice for Oklahoma’s next offensive coordinator. And then Arnold will make his decision to either go play somewhere else or remember why he chose OU. And then the new OC and the Sooner coaching staff will finish the process of replacing Sperry, the incoming recruit who had been committed for a year and a half but suddenly got cold feet and flipped to Florida State. And another top 10 recruiting class will sign to play for the Sooners. And then Bill Bedenbaugh will dive into the NCAA Transfer Portal to find some competitive offensive linemen. And then all those injured receivers will get healthy in the offseason. And for OU fans, hope springs eternal. 

But for Julie Venables, she’ll still fly to New York for treatments and she’ll still feel nauseous 23 hours a day and she’ll still choke down dozens of pills and she won’t have much energy but she’ll still cheer passionately every time Oklahoma takes the field and her husband is on the sideline. She's been his biggest fan since Day 1.

My mother was one of the toughest women I’ve ever known, but she couldn’t beat breast cancer. She fought that dragon for eight years, and she certainly got her shots in, certainly wounded it many times. Eventually, it took her.

Thankfully, cancer treatment and therapy has gotten better since then. Those doctors and scientists and researchers and care givers are special people that give the rest of us hope.

So are the thousands of prayer warriors who will lift Julie up as she endures the coming challenges of the dreaded disease. Those prayers will help. 

And the unyielding support of her family will be her rock. She’ll have lots of good days, and, from the sound of it, lots of bad days. But as long as she’s with her family, even the bad days will be pretty OK.

And she will continue to inspire those around her with her determination, her toughness, her grit and her fighting spirit.

“Her spirit and her strength, just nothing short of amazing,” Venables said last Monday. “… We’ve got a great team and great faith. It’s in God’s hands. But a big part of that battle is her wanting us to fight and keep swinging, so that’s what she’s doing.”

So even if the Sooners get blown out by the Crimson Tide on Saturday night, even if they lose at LSU, even if they don’t make a bowl game, give Brent Venables your grace.

Then again, if they do shock the world and beat Bama and LSU and even win a bowl game, give the man his flowers — and maybe even change your narrative while you're at it.