Oklahoma is heading into a different kind of SEC grind this fall, and Brent Venables sounds perfectly fine with that.
The conference has shifted to a nine-game league schedule, cutting one non-conference matchup in favor of another SEC showdown. It’s a change made possible by the 12-team playoff, but it also raises the bar for every team trying to reach the CFP. After years of debate when Oklahoma and Texas first agreed to join the league, the move is now real in Year 3 of the SEC’s 16-team era.
For Oklahoma, the schedule is loaded with the kind of games that can define a season. The Sooners will face Georgia, Ole Miss and Texas A&M in the regular season, and all three were in last year’s CFP field.
They’ll also play Texas, visit Florida in the Swamp, and go on the road to Missouri and Mississippi State. On top of that, Oklahoma will host South Carolina and Kentucky, while also keeping its non-conference showcase against Michigan.
Venables isn’t backing away from any of it. If anything, he sounds energized by the challenge.
"I'm for whatever the leadership decides," Venables said at SEC Media Days in Tampa. "I'm a great teammate."
He also made clear that the added conference game fits the way he wants his program to operate.
"I love being on a big stage with high expectations where there's a lot at stake," he said. "I've always enjoyed that. I think our players do as well."
The SEC schedule is shaping up like a weekly stress test for a lot of teams. Ole Miss has to travel to Texas and host Georgia in two of the three weeks before its trip to Norman. Texas, meanwhile, gets Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida and Ole Miss in back-to-back-to-back-to-back games.
And with the playoff now at 12 teams, the SEC still hasn’t escaped the frustration of teams feeling left out. In each of the first two years of the expanded format, at least one SEC school has believed it had the résumé to get in and still ended up on the outside looking in. Adding another conference game only makes that conversation louder.
Venables, though, isn’t spending much time on the politics of the bracket.
"You just play your schedule and they'll figure all the playoff stuff out and all those types of things," Venables said. "We have so many other things that we do control, and so that's kind of where we're at when it comes to what all that looks like."
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