OU president and AD say they still believe in Brent Venables:
“It’s unwavering right now,” Harroz said at the OU Board of Regents meeting. “We know it’s been a tough season. I’ve been around Oklahoma football for a long time. We have the right coach. This is our coach. We knew it was going to be a tough year going to the SEC the first year. You add that with all the things taking place around the shifting NIL landscape, with hopefully more certainty coming next year, if the preliminary approval becomes final in the lawsuit. We knew there was going to be some turbulence. Obviously, we’d love to have had more wins, but our confidence in the coach is as steady as it’s ever been.”
Castiglione echoed Harroz’s sentiments.
“We’re mindful that we haven’t met the Oklahoma standard for 2024,” Castiglione said “That said, we truly believe in Coach Venables and our team. We are completely focused on both supporting them and looking at all the ways to address the needed improvements now as soon as possible as well in preparation for next year and working with Coach Venables to help in all of that process. At the same time, we want to make sure we’re accentuating the strengths that we’re seeing developed in our program that are growing and performing at a rate that we also need to be successful in the SEC and beyond. So it’s a holistic approach to making sure that we’re focusing on all the important initiatives to support Coach Venables and our team.”
“The stability and the strength as we go forward was an important characteristic we wanted to embrace across many other areas, not just this contract, but fortifying the people involved so we can be successful,” Castiglione said. “You talk about the extension, providing the stability… It’s counting down. The original contract was counting down. We just wanted to be able to address the growth of the program going forward. We had a very positive 10-win season last year. And we believed stability would be important for him and the staff and how we recruit and retain players even in this new and unique environment.”
“I’ll be involved in supporting him, understanding ways that he needs to compete to get the right person here,” Castiglione said. “I believe in Brent. He’s gone up against the best offensive coordinators that college football has seen as a defensive coordinator. He understands as any head coach would what makes teams tough to defend, and we want to be focused on hiring a coach that can assemble the strategy to make our offense one of the toughest to defend in college football. You do that with getting the right coaches to identify the right talent and teach and develop them.
“Put the team in a position to be successful and play complementary football. Because we’ve seen all of the time how important that is to win games, especially in a very, very challenging league like the SEC. But we want to continue to have our sights set on being among the best in the SEC and beyond.”
“We understand it, and we even share in it,” Castiglione said. “We’re invested in this. We all work to be the best we can be. I believe we’ve identified the key areas that need to be addressed and improved, and we’re going to do everything in our power to fix it. We are a championship level program, we’ve been champions and we know what it looks like and we know what we need to do to put ourselves back in that position.”
