Welcome to the big chair, Brent Venables.
Oklahoma is in the midst of its first 3-game losing streak since 1998, which is basically so distant it might as well be the mesozoic era for most Sooner football fans. Speaking plainly, the actual football played within the Sooners' ongoing losing streak is the program's worst in a long, long time, and maybe ever.
The offense's struggles over the past two weeks can at least be pinned on the concussion of quarterback Dillon Gabriel, but Gabriel doesn't play defense. Kansas State quarterback Adrian Martinez and running back Duce Vaughn gashed the Sooners for 260 yards and four touchdowns on 46 combined carries in a 41-34 Wildcats win. A week later, TCU bombed the OU defense with four touchdowns of at least 62 yards and 668 total yards in a 55-24 Frogs win.
After sounding the alarms, having all the come-to-Jesus meetings and setting the alarms to DEFCON1, Oklahoma went out and played even worse against rival Texas, suffering the worst shutout loss in program history. Texas punished Oklahoma equally on the ground and through the air (296 rushing yards, 289 passing), and the final result was actually worse than the 49-0 final score, considering the Longhorns did not pass the ball after the 3:37 mark of the third quarter.
And so now Venables has the unenviable but all-too-common challenge of trying to stop a boulder while it's already rolling downhill.
Quite frankly, Venables doesn't have a lot of experience here, and neither does anyone at Oklahoma. Program patriarchs Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops never suffered a losing season in 34 combined seasons as OU's head coach. Venables never suffered a losing season in 30 years as a head coach. Only twice in a decade did Venables's Clemson teams lose three times over the course of the entire season. Kansas State never lost three in a row in his six years as a Bill Snyder assistant, either.
The last prolonged stretch of losing football Venables has experienced came in 1992, his senior season, when Kansas State dropped four straight games on their way to a 5-6 season.
So, how does Venables plan to coach the Sooners out of this mess?
"You use 20 years of experience and over a decade of excellence, systematically," he said Tuesday. "The biggest thing is developing the fundamentals, the understanding, the techniques. Helping guys find the football, get off blocks, take good angles, trust their eyes, trust their responsibility, and then do it over and over and over and over and over, and not get bored with it."
One thing the last three games have laid bare is that Venables and his defensive staff have to teach his players arithmetic before they can move on to algebra and, hopefully one day, calculus.
"We're still trying to develop some of the things that have to be second nature for you as a player so that you're not playing paralyzed, that you can play aggressively and confidently, but technically sound. I think the fundamentals and the understanding are going to show up under pressure, and right now those things aren't showing up," he said.
"We're not tackling very good right now, if anybody hasn't noticed. We're not fitting very good. We're getting lost in traffic. What we're seeing in the course of the week isn't translating consistently like it needs to, just to play well -- not to play great, just to play well."
That right there should reset expectations for Oklahoma fans -- as if the last three games haven't done that on their own -- as the Sooners brace for a difficult second half, starting with No. 19 Kansas. OU's defense ranks No. 84 in FEI (to use one metric), and all six remaining offenses rank higher than 84th.
All of the above illustrates how Venables plans to attack the technical football problems at hand. But equally important is the abstract mental issues Oklahoma is clearly dealing with. Those issues run hand-in-hand, and one can't be solved without the other: Oklahoma players won't start playing better until they feel confident, but they won't feel confident until the play better. So how does Venables plan to motivate this team to try to play better?
"People are going to remember this team by how we finish," Venables said.