Oklahoma Sooners HC Brent Venables keeps it all the way real after his team beat the UTEP Miners 51-0
The Oklahoma Sooners put up half a hundred points on UTEP, and Brent Venables still isn’t satisfied.
It’s not hard to see why players love Oklahoma Sooners head coach Brent Venables so much. He has that loving but tough-love, father-kind-of approach to his players. He truly is a players’ coach. On Friday, even after the 51-0 win over the UTEP Miners, we saw a bit of that.
“We played the way I thought we would. A little off,” Venables told reporters at the start of his press conference after the game. “No one is beating their chest. We left some meat on the bone. If we are going to be the team we want to be, we have to do the things winning requires… I felt like this was a 41-40 game, only because I know what we are capable of.”
Brent Venables’ comments about the Sooners’ 51-0 win are completely warranted
This is as real as it gets. Venables is showing the side the players actually love to see and hear from their head coach. Sure, they won 51-0. But he feels like that’s a 41-40 game. That’s not good. And it’s certainly not good enough for the standard he has set at Oklahoma. This is him sending a message to his team that even in a 51-0 win, there’s work to be done. That is why the players love him, and this message is real. In fact, I’m surprised he’s not more upset.
It’s always okay to be happy about a 51-0 win. But you always have to look at every aspect, every side of every game. There’s some good — the run game was solid, John Mateer looked comfortable, etc. But 51-0 is not enough. It could have been a much bigger discrepancy. Not to mention, UTEP had some really good explosive plays, a few of them that should have led to points.
Fortunately for the Sooners, every time that happened, UTEP either missed the field goal (0/3) or fumbled the ball on a jet sweep. Honestly, Oklahoma is lucky that UTEP didn’t score, because there should have been at least 12 points on the board. Sure, that’s still a 51-12 win, theoretically. But it’s about the principle that Venables is preaching. Things certainly have to get cleaned up.
