NORMAN — Oklahoma coach Brent Venables surveys the remainder of the Sooners’ schedule and is as trustworthy as he could be.
“We could win every game,” Venables mentioned. “We could certainly lose every game.”
Venables and the Sooners (4-3 general, 1-3 Big 12 Conference) hit the highway Saturday for a morning sport at Iowa State.
The Cyclones (3-4, 0-4) have the league’s fiercest protection and their 4 defeats are by 14 factors mixed, however Venables stays unyielding.
“We’re gonna get everybody’s A game,” he mentioned Tuesday throughout his weekly news convention. “Every single body that we play. That’s just the way it is.
“We got everything we need,” he mentioned. “That’s what I know.”
It’s been powerful to search out the ground within the Big 12 this fall. When the crew on the backside of the standings casts concern like Iowa State — a crew whose strengths are protection and soccer fundamentals — there are not any simple weekends.
Most years, OU is a heavy favourite in a sport like this. That doesn’t apply in 2022, and whereas which may be maddening to the fan base, Venables embraces it.
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“That’s the game of football,” Venables mentioned. “You can’t cheat this game. This game will reward you for precision, for your work, for your grind. What you do in the dark. It will reward you for that. It’ll punish you for mistakes.
“Whether we’re 6-0, I probably would say the same thing.”
A traditional instance got here right now final yr, when Lincoln Riley selected to take care of a run of accidents by giving the crew a time off as a substitute of practising the Monday earlier than the Kansas sport. At halftime of that sport, the Sooners trailed 10-0 and wanted two big performs within the fourth quarter to carry on to a win.
Venables mentioned he’s been fortunate in his profession to be a part of teaching staffs that centered on “respecting the game, respecting what it takes to prepare to play well, to play consistently — you know, all the little things, perspective and mindset of an opponent, be competing to a standard every single day and learning, deeply buying into that.
“And if you skip a day, if it’s an occasional belief, right, if it’s an occasional commitment, then you’re going to be exposed.
“This game rewards you for what you do consistently, not what you do occasionally. It doesn’t reward you for what everybody else thinks that you could be. It doesn’t reward you for your potential. It rewards you for future performance. This is a game of performance. What you do on the field matters. What you do on the practice field matters. What you do in recovery and on the practice field, in the meeting rooms.”
Venables described the flexibility to search out success “amongst the chaos” as a energy. At Oklahoma, a 4-3 file might actually be described as chaos.
“Say it’s Oklahoma or 7-0, right?” he mentioned. “We’d be the talk in college football and everything else. There’s still gonna be the chaos going on outside those walls. Here we are, 4-3, and there’s whatever chaos is. To me, you gotta have calm over it. To me, the more chaotic it gets, for me personally, the quieter it gets, for whatever reason.
“What we’ve been through and then what’s lying ahead, you know, requires guts. It requires some belief. Requires work. It requires mental toughness. Requires perseverance. None of that is is maddening.”
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