A frustrated linebacker approached Jim Leavitt as he perched on a bench outside Kansas State’s locker room.
Practice had gone poorly for the Garden City Community College transfer from Salina, Kansas, so he asked his position coach how he could improve.
“Why don’t you just start running stadium stairs?” Leavitt suggested before looking away briefly, then looking back to quite the surprise. “The next thing I knew, in full pads, he was running up and down the entire stadium.”
Brent Venables touched every last stair in KSU Stadium, then sat down next to Leavitt for a long talk.
“It was really a moment where I knew this guy was going to do whatever it took to be a great player,” Leavitt said of Venables.
“He's not pretentious in any way. He doesn't mind asking for help. He's very open about things that, ‘Hey, you know, I might need help here. I might need help there,’ and leaning on people. And I think that attitude where you're confident but you don't have that ego in the way of asking for help, I think shows great maturity.”
Now, nearly 30 years into his coaching career, Venables is still running stairs. Temperatures over 90 degrees couldn’t stop him from sprinting up and down the Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium steps before each of his first two games as OU’s head coach, while the media looked on shortly after his weekly press conferences. Similarly, many of the habits he developed as a fledgling assistant in Manhattan are still foundational to his efforts in Norman.
Y’all wanted video. Here’s video. Venables is back on the steps. pic.twitter.com/6qDcezVz4P
— John E. Hoover (@johnehoover) August 30, 2022
Since Venables was hired in December, the Sooners are 3-0 under their first-time head coach and are looking to open Big 12 play with a win over Kansas State (2-1) Saturday in Norman.
Venables said ahead of the matchup that time has tempered the nostalgia some might associate with coaching against his alma mater. After all, he went 8-1 against the Wildcats as OU’s defensive coordinator from 1999-2011. He has also since won three national championships — one with Oklahoma, two with Clemson — as one of the premier defensive coordinators in college football.
“I reflect about my opportunities and my relationships all the time,” Venables said Tuesday. “When I think about Kansas State, I go back to when I played there and the mentors that I had and the wonderful experiences I had in Manhattan. But it's a long time ago. And so from a football standpoint, you've been invested in a variety of communities, decades at multiple spots.
“I appreciate the people that poured into me, certainly — here, there, Clemson, now back here — a lot, but no more there than anywhere else.”
Even so, Venables gushed about his relationship with legendary Kansas State coach Bill Snyder. He still values the lessons he learned and the practices he primed as a relentless player, gritty graduate assistant and aspiring linebackers coach.
He can't deny the purple strands in his DNA and what they’ve meant to his first season commanding the crimson and cream. Most glaringly is an innate focus on OU’s success regardless of the shifting landscape around him, not unlike the concentration with which he bounds up and down concrete stairs.
Brent Venables at Kansas State
OU head coach Brent Venables during his time as an assistant at Kansas State.
When his playing career concluded after the 1992 season, Venables fell into coaching thanks to the influence of Leavitt and Bob and Mike Stoops, who he’d later work with at Oklahoma. Kansas State’s defense was resurrected at that time, going from ranked 107th when Leavitt and Bob Stoops took over as co-coordinators to first nationally in six years.
“Brent saw that, he was a part of it both as a player and a coach, and I think that he just fell in love with it,” Leavitt said. “His passion took him that way and it was really fun to see that transition.”
Staff meetings were instrumental to Venables’ growth, helping him understand work ethic and how coaches’ personalities differed when relating to one another versus players. He saw how Snyder divided work, often trusting run-game coordinator Mark Mangino with the most responsibility. Yet, Snyder always had work for anyone who asked, and Venables wasn’t afraid to inquire.
“Brent is a coach that has earned his way in the profession,” said Mangino, who was later OU’s offensive coordinator and Kansas’ head coach. “He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. During my years with him, he tackled every task with enthusiasm. He will be successful at OU because he pays attention to everything. He’s a warrior.”
Above all, Snyder preached a consistent message to his coaches and held them accountable while appreciating their input.
“For me, as a young coach, he created belief in me, made me feel valued,” Venables said of Snyder. “When I would have a suggestion or a question or an observation, he always listened to me. He created an environment where I felt welcome to have input. He said ‘Any questions or any thoughts?’ I'd raise my hand up. ‘Yeah, I got one over here.’ And I'm sure that older coaches were perturbed, but I wanted to learn. But he always made me feel valued.”
Leavitt recalls Venables mostly doing “whatever we told him to do,” but he could still feel “the yearning, the passion,” in his young GA, who for a time was K-State’s punt team coordinator.
Venables became a prospector, not literally digging for gold, but mining game film late into the night, searching for any advantage.
“(Snyder’s) like, ‘videotape, there's so much DNA on the videotape if you're willing to look for it and study it,’ Venables said. “And so if it’s that offensive guard stance, where his hands are placed, his feet, the stripe of his helmet if it’s slightly turned, things like that could be a key, a tip.
“He's like, ‘that one small thing can make the difference in winning or losing.’ … You’re always like ‘What could you find this week to help us win? Really, I religiously believed in that. It could be the smallest thing to make a difference in a game, and it still does to this day.”
OU head coach Brent Venables during his time as an assistant at Kansas State.
Seeing those tendencies in Venables gave Leavitt all the more confidence. When Leavitt left Manhattan after the 1995 season to kickstart the football program at South Florida, Snyder asked him who he should hire as the Wildcats’ next linebackers coach.
Before the Holiday Bowl against Colorado State, Leavitt took a backseat for a week while Venables coached and Snyder observed, solidifying Venables’ promotion.
“I said, ‘if you want somebody who has a great passion for the game, that's just like I am, that is relentless, that's going to do a great job, I said, hire Brent,” Leavitt said. “I said ‘Coach, you cannot, you will not hire anybody better. You just won't.’”
Venables held that role for three seasons before making what he said was his toughest career choice, when Bob Stoops asked him to be co-defensive coordinator with Mike Stoops at Oklahoma.
His mother, Nancy Schumaker, encouraged him to remain loyal to Snyder, who gave him his first opportunities as a coach. Simultaneously, he was poised to become the Wildcats’ sole defensive coordinator with Mike Stoops’ departure and felt he needed more growth to be ready for such a position. That quest for growth led him to OU, then Clemson where he further honed the skills necessary to be the Sooners’ head coach.
Through it all, his experiences in the meeting room and scouring game video have shaped the foundation he is laying in his first season as Oklahoma’s program leader, much as Snyder set the standards for the Wildcats years ago.
Venables’ players, pampered with new suits and recovery equipment during the offseason and fed spiritually through the S.O.U.L. Mission initiative, feel valued. Many have gone as far as to say they would run through a wall for Venables and stated their appreciation for the structure he has provided.
“You’re not going to be successful in coaching, in my opinion, if you don’t care about young people,” Leavitt said. “And that’s what Bill Snyder would always talk about. And you gotta go the extra mile, and you gotta spend time with your players, because we don't have jobs if not for them. And Brent remembers when he played and all the different things.
“You gotta have love and discipline. Those two words, I always used at South Florida. You gotta love your players, but you also have to have discipline within your program. Discipline is a big part of caring about your players and trying to get to a point where they have success in life, not only on the football field, and being sincere about that. Not just something that's talked about, but something that's acted upon, and Brent will act upon those things.”
OU football head coach Brent Venables during the game against Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska on Sept. 17, 2022.
Leavitt was impressed with how Venables prepared OU for Nebraska last weekend, when the Sooners could’ve easily been trapped by a Cornhuskers squad fighting for pride after the firing of coach Scott Frost.
Defensive coordinator Ted Roof, a veteran journeyman coach like Leavitt, was asked a few days afterward to evaluate Venables’ leadership through the nine months he has been in charge.
“He's a very, very strong leader that values everybody,” Roof said, unknowingly paralleling Venables to his mentor, Snyder. “He's able to articulate a very clear vision so that we can all try and establish that vision — the culture that he's created from an accountability standpoint, from a discipline standpoint, from a toughness standpoint, and then the impact that he has in recruiting.
“He's involved in every phase of our program, and he's been an extremely strong leader, and it makes it good to come to work for a guy like that every day, that also really, really cares about the development — not just what happens on the field, but cares about our guys, what kind of men they become. And it's not that way everywhere, but it sure is here.”
It’s unclear which version of Kansas State Venables and OU will see Saturday — the one that clobbered South Dakota and Missouri, or the one that lost 17-10 to Tulane at home last week. But who his team plays this week, next month or in the postseason pales in comparison to leading his team to play to a standard, not any opponent.
Venables is all about what’s important to the current success of Oklahoma, focused on daily improvement now every bit as much as he was when he ran stairs all those years ago.
“I go into every game the same that I always have,” Venables said. “I know I'm the head coach, but getting ready for a game is the same. I look at the scheme and the DNA more than I do at the logos and all the other dynamic things that are interesting to everyone else or not interesting to me, with all due respect. What do we gotta do to win?
“And so that's what this week is about, is trying to put everything we’ve got, and the most important game of the year is this week, and it happens to be Kansas State.”
