Brent Venables holds nothing back when calling out former Oklahoma Sooners head coach for disastrous state of the roster

Venables fires off a shot at Lincoln Riley

At his Week One press conference ahead of the Sooners' season-opener against Illinois State, Venables spoke about the state of Oklahoma's roster compared to previous teams.

In his observation, he noted the differences between the team he inherited and the team they are now. Venables admitted that the Sooners were a mess when he was hired, bringing in a laundry list of issues that he and his staff would have to completely overhaul if they wanted to succeed.

"As a football program, we had a lot of issues our first year...We had a 2.2 team GPA...we had a lot of failed drug tests-a lot of....We had to start completely over."

This has been another public (and damning) statement of how the Oklahoma program was when Lincoln Riley seemingly fled in the middle of the night to take the job as head coach of the USC Trojans. (I'd pay quite a bit of money to know what Venables was going to say before he caught himself at the end of the quote.) While Venables didn't outright call out Lincoln Riley by name, it feels rather implied.

Players like Billy Bowman have remarked about how the Sooners didn't have any team cohesion until Venables showed up and started building a culture. Oklahoma's lack of recruiting ability at key positions under Lincoln Riley bit them even last season. The Sooners were an utter disaster that seemingly had at least a couple of players every offseason end up in some sort of legal trouble.

Riley built a team full of individuals, individuals whose sole goal was to just play football with little consequences outside of that focus. That might have flown in the yesteryears of Barry Switzer, but it's 2025.

Venables hasn't been perfect, and he'll be the first to tell you that. However, it's abundantly clear that the overall health of the program is in a state it hasn't been in for a decade. The culture that Brent Venables has built is strong and largely appealing to several recruits. The staff has a proven past track record of successful recruiting, and it's hard to overlook the fact that the Sooners physically look like they can compete in the SEC after years of getting piledriven by those teams under Riley.

These words might seem empty to Oklahoma fans, who just want to see the program get back to its winning ways and are tired of excuses. However, I think this illustrates just how complete of a 180 the program has undergone in just a few short seasons, and it's a testament to the type of man and coach Brent Venables is.

The results have to speak for themselves moving forward, but it's an important fact to keep in mind moving forward.