Oklahoma Coach Brent Venables Expounds on His Notion That the Sooners are 'Tired'

While some elements will lighten up as OU preps for Kansas this week, he dug in on "you have to practice tough to play tough" ahead of next week's open date.

NORMAN — When Brent Venables said after taking a 49-0 loss to rival Texas on Saturday that his team looked "tired" and needed to be "fresher," it raised a lot of eyebrows.

This Oklahoma team has been on an entirely different grind ever since Lincoln Riley left — and took defensive coordinator Alex Grinch and strength coach Bennie Wiley with him — for USC.

It's been an emotional roller coaster. Under a new coaching staff, thee's been a lot of adrenaline, which can't be sustained. New strength coach Jerry Schmidt's workouts have been far more physically taxing than Wiley's. And numerous times through training camp and the early part of the regular season, Venables extolled the virtues of "24 straight days of inside drill."

Now, he said, the team is fatigued — both physically and emotionally.

"Some ways," he said Saturday, "we looked like maybe a tired football team. There's probably several reasons why. ... We need to be fresher, and look at everything.”

Venables went more in-depth Tuesday during his weekly news conference, when he fielded back-to-back questions about his declaration in Dallas.

“The season is always challenging,” he said. “And and so mentally and physically, whether you're winning a whole bunch of games — as the season goes on, the air gets thinner. It gets harder, not easier. No matter what, whether you're being successful, or you're not being successful, it gets harder.

“The day to day grind — it’s hard to show up every day and do the mundane in doing it every single day over and over and over and over. And you do it to a point where you can't get it wrong. And that's a very hard place to get to.”

OU's open date comes after one more college football Saturday. The Sooners play host to No. 19-ranked Kansas on Saturday at 11 a.m., and the surprising Jayhawks have been college football's most surprising team to this point of the season.

Last year, amid nine straight weeks of games, Riley gave the team a day off as they prepped for KU — and it almost blew up in their face as the Sooners nearly lost in Lawrence.

This year, Venables told AllSooners, any days off can wait until next week.

“We got an hour practice on Monday night, non-padded, then we’re gonna go do community service on Tuesday, then Wednesday we’ll have a padded practice and then we’ll have a shorter practice on Thursday,” he said.

After that, players will have Friday, Saturday and Sunday off before returning to work the following Monday.

But Venables will act on the fatigue he saw last week.

“This is that week that we start to tweak our schedule,” he said. “Maybe it's a week or so too late, I don't know.”

He said he didn’t want “tired” to become an excuse.

“I’m the one that brought it up. I know,” Venables said. “And, so I do think that, you know, we need to help our guys get fresh.”

Practices will get a little shorter, and there will be less physical scrimmage-type work, less “good on good.”

But he’ll continue to demand physicality and tough workouts.

“I’m digging my feet in here, you know, my cleats in the ground,” Venables said, “but I feel very confidently about, that's not abnormal. Might be abnormal for other guys, you know, on staff or on the team. But it's not abnormal for me. You’ve got to practice tough to play tough, and we're not as tough as we need to be right now. And that’s on us as coaches. It's not not pointing the finger at anybody, you know, we just got to continue to develop that. And so hopefully over time, we'll get there.”