Oklahoma’s Friday night season opener is drawing the kind of pushback you’d expect in a state where fall Fridays belong to high school football, but Brent Venables isn’t treating it like the start of a new habit.
The Sooners open against UTEP at 7 p.m. CT on Friday after OU moved the game back a day in June, a decision tied to weather and to giving Venables an extra 24 hours to get ready for Michigan the following week. For plenty of fans, that meant an awkward collision: the Sooners on one screen, a local high school game on the other.
Venables said he gets it.
“There’s no perfect way to do it," Venables said. "My job is to do what's best for our football team.
There’s some layers to it. Hopefully that’s not gonna be anything of who we are from one year to the next.
“We certainly value high school football and the purity of it and what it means to so many people. This is just a unique moment is how I look at it.
But not ideal. I certainly understand the dilemma.”
He made the same point again when asked about the impact on high school football.
“I don’t love that part of it,” Venables said of the interference with preps football. “I don’t think it’ll be a part of who we are moving forward."
That’s the tension here. Friday night football in Oklahoma has a meaning all its own, and this opener forces people to choose.
Parents with kids playing that night can’t be in two places at once. Fans who work Fridays may have to scramble to make it to Norman.
Even OU’s scouting staff loses out, since they won’t be able to spend Friday night evaluating recruits or hosting top targets.
Still, there’s a practical side to the move that’s hard to ignore. Saturday is suddenly wide open for fans, and the weekend forecast only adds to the appeal, with temperatures expected to hover near 100 degrees. A night game is a lot easier to live with than a blistering afternoon kickoff.
The bigger football reason is even more obvious: Oklahoma gets an extra day to recover and prepare for a trip to Ann Arbor to face No. 16 Michigan at 11 a.m.
CT on Sept. 12.
Nobody is going to complain much about a Friday-night detour if it helps the Sooners land a top-20 road win the next week.
So yes, this one is unusual. And yes, it steps on a sacred fall night in the state. But by Venables’ own account, it’s a one-off, not a template.
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