DALLAS — As painful as it was in the moment, as messy as it was in the aftermath, Lincoln Riley did Oklahoma a favor when he took off in the middle of the night for the glitz of Los Angeles. The moment Riley took the pile of cash waiting for him on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the program he left began to get its identity back.  

That’s not intended to cast aspersions. Riley is a brilliant young football mind who did tremendous things in his five years with the Sooners and may well exceed those heights at Southern California. 

But for all the wins, the Heisman Trophy quarterbacks and Big 12 championships there was always something about Oklahoma football that never looked quite right. On Saturday, in a wild Red River Rivalry game with more stomach-turning thrills than any ride at the Texas State Fair, the Sooners got their program back.

Oklahoma probably isn’t going to win a national championship this year. But after beating No. 4 Texas 34-30 in the 19th game of the Brent Venables era, you can see why the Sooners believe they have the coach who can do it one day in the future. 

Because for all the problems that enveloped the earliest part of his tenure, it didn’t take Venables long to make Oklahoma look like Oklahoma again.

“We’re certainly nowhere near where we want to be,” Sooners athletics director Joe Castiglione said. “But Brent has been part of programs that have been pulled up from the dust. He’s been around, and he’s battle tested, but at the same time he’s the most unselfish coach. He’s selfish about doing what’s right for the players. That’s his absolute bone deep conviction. That’s all he wants. And they’ve responded.”

Again, nothing against Riley. He went 55-10 for goodness sakes and had a line on every elite quarterback prospect in the country. Oklahoma would have been good every year for as long as he wanted to coach there. 

But that version of Oklahoma didn’t look like championship football when it really mattered. It was all offense, all the time, to the seeming detriment of everything else. As thrilling as it was to watch Baker Mayfield or Kyler Murray throw a touchdown pass, it was probably even more maddening to see the missed tackles, the soft scheme and the general lack of physicality that made mediocre opponents look like video game operators. 

When Riley left, it was a shock to the system. Oklahoma, one of the great programs of the modern era, didn’t really know how to handle it. You even had state legislators trolling Riley with bills to rename desolate stretches of panhandle highway after him. It was a bizarre time.  

But Castiglione couldn’t afford to get caught up in the emotion. As consistent as Oklahoma has been, success is usually on the knife’s edge in this sport. One bad hire and you can go backward for half a decade. 

Venables was both a no-brainer and a big risk. He had been part of the Oklahoma rebuild under Bob Stoops before falling out of favor a bit late in his tenure as defensive coordinator. Then he went to Clemson where he won two national titles and built arguably the best defenses in the sport. Venables checked a lot of the traditional boxes, but he’d never been a head coach. There were some around the profession who wondered whether he was better suited to be a career assistant than a CEO. 

Those whispers did not go away last season when Oklahoma went 6-7 in a mess of a year that included a 49-0 beatdown at the hands of Texas. If Riley’s pretty style of play didn’t exactly jibe with the Midwest ethos of Oklahoma, what would you call being that mediocre?

To boil it down, Oklahoma was essentially the same, soft, defensively-deficient team Riley had built — only without the elite quarterback in Caleb Williams to make them all look good since he had followed Riley to Los Angeles.

Whether it was totally his fault or not, it looked like Venables might be on a quick hot seat. But Castiglione had a different take. 

“First of all, this program, we don’t ever make excuses,” he said. “There were obviously tough moments. I think there were several games that were just right there to win. And for whatever reason, we couldn’t pull it out where we made a mistake at the end to lose. So it was just more of what do we need to keep doing to get better? But there was a lot of transition we had to overcome.”

There was more transition this season. Venables flipped the roster with a mix of freshmen and transfers, but he also had time. And in Year 2, this looks like the kind of team that would reflect what Venables wants: Physical, aggressive, disruptive, even a little mean. They make tackles in space. They don’t give up when things don’t go their way. They can win when their offense isn’t working, and they can win when other teams hit big plays on them. 

It’s funny, but Oklahoma gave up 527 offensive yards to Texas on Saturday but it might have been the best defensive performance by the Sooners in years because they generated three turnovers, had a goal-line stand early in the fourth quarter and generally didn’t allow those simple but soul-crushing plays where you've got somebody in front of you and you just don’t get them on the ground because you don't have the technique and physicality to make a stop.

Venables hasn’t just changed the roster, he’s changed the culture — a buzzword and cliche, sure, but one that has resonance when you see a team that clearly has an investment in defense and playing the game with as much force as finesse. 

“We’re better in every area,” Venables said. “We’re not where we want to be. But this is the next step. This is a very determined football team, and there’s a lot of belief for having 63 new players. This is a team that’s close. There’s a lot of trust and respect, and it’s genuine. They have a blue-collar mindset to show up every day with the same attitude to be an example of consistency. That’s what the great programs do, and we’re striving for that.”

As 6-0 Oklahoma keeps rolling up the wins, there will surely be a lot of comparisons to 2000 when the Sooners came from nowhere in Bob Stoops’ second season and won the national title. Venables, who was the co-defensive coordinator for that team, didn’t exactly shy away from it.

“We were a bunch of misfits,” he said. “We didn’t know how good we could be and as a group they were tough as all get out and just came every day and went to work. These guys have been exactly that, but we’re a little shinier in some spots.”

There’s no way to know whether this Oklahoma team will take a similar course. And until Saturday, it wasn’t completely clear how much had really changed in 365 days. But the toughness it took for the Sooners to pull this one out was a clear sign that the Venables impact is meaningful and real. 

Oklahoma has an identity again and a massive win to show for it. Who knows where this is going to lead. But after beating Texas, one thing is for sure: They can finally put the Riley era in the past. 

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