A final chat with Venables on his final day at OU
Published: 1/19/2012 3:13 PM
Last Modified: 1/19/2012 3:18 PM
Dropped by the Switzer Center to say goodbye to a friend this afternoon. A coach, too.
Brent Venables was packing up, literally, for Clemson. There were a couple cardboard boxes on the floor by his desk. One included some of those white commemorative footballs. Game balls, I presume, that he had collected from his 13 years as Oklahoma's linebackers coach/co-defensive coordinator/defensive coordinator.
The cell phone by his desk chimed with a text every other minute, it seemed. He had about a thousand things to do at once, with his official introduction in South Carolina a little over 24 hours away.
Still, he invited the Norman Transcript's John Shinn and me to have a seat on the sofa. He walked away from the phone. And for about 25 minutes the three of us did what we always loved doing, me since 2001 when I started covering the Sooners for the Transcript and Shinnsy since '04, the year he replaced me on the beat.
We shot the spit. One last time, we just talked.
We talked about Venables' decision to leave Bob Stoops' nest, and how hard it is to do that after so long. It's so hard that for a time even Wednesday, the day he ultimately decided to leave, Venables thought he would stay. It wasn't until Wednesday night he informed Stoops that no, the time was right and this was something he needed to do.
We talked about the how tough the 2011 season had been. And how tough the 1999 season had been – when Venables and the Stoops boys first realized just how hard it was going to be to change OU's culture.
We talked about how tough the 2012 season is going to be for Venables, finally striking out on his own, but how good he feels to be in the company of Dabo Swinney and new Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris.
We talked about Mike Stoops and how good it was to have him back in the office, and how Bob and Mike both bent over backwards, frontwards and sideways to make the old dynamic from 99-03 work again. It was going to happen, had Clemson not presented an opportunity Venables needed to take for the sake of his career.
We talked about OSU and K-State and KU and Baylor and TCU, about the Big 12 and the ACC, about coaches here and there, and players.
More than anything, though, we talked about feelings and emotions, and how hard they can be on a guy at a time like this.
Venables won't need to worry about reflecting back once he hits the ground sprinting at Clemson. But he's still in Oklahoma, and it hits him like Torrance Marshall that he's still, for another few hours anyway, at a place he calls home.
He choked up about it on Norman's KREF Radio this morning. He started telling Toby Rowland how much OU means to him and how his kids were all born in Norman, and then he stopped to try to compose himself.
Venables didn't break down in front of Shinnsy and me this afternoon. But after a hello handshake, he hugged us as he greeted us outside his office. He hugged us again as we left him nearly a half-hour later.
He had hugged me once before. It was sort of out of nowhere after OU's Sun Bowl victory two years ago. I thought it a little odd, until I stopped to realize all that team had been through, and how hard that defense had fought to keep the team above water. As I wrote in this space earlier this week, Venables is one of the proudest men I've ever known. And if a Sun Bowl win didn't seem so hot to some at the time, it meant a hell of a lot to a defensive coordinator who had busted his butt for four months to maintain a standard.
Today's embrace didn't seem odd at all. It was genuine. Venables is gonna miss his home.
Assistant strength coach Corey Callens popped in at one point for goodbyes. Venables rose, hugged him as well, and started going on about coaching Callens' ass off in the 2000 national championship game.
"It's been fun," Callens said.
"It's been fun," Venables agreed.
-- Guerin Emig
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
