Oklahoma has a new football coach and a whole lot of new players.

In an interview during Big 12 Media Days in Dallas, new coach Brent Venables thinks any newness will be overshadowed by the 14 years he spent as an OU assistant before becoming the defensive coordinator at Clemson.

On the Sooners 2022 Team, 40 percent of the roster will have never put on a Sooner jersey in a game before until this fall. OU has 33 new scholarship players and 15 new walk-ons. OU’s new transfers have started 243 games at other schools and played in 444 games.

Jeffery Johnson has 44 career starts; quarterback Dillon Gabriel, 35 career starts; Trey Morrison, 44 career starts; Kyle Ergenbright, 34 career starts; McKade Mettauer, 28; Jonah Laulu, 18; and tight end, Parker, 25 career starts.

“I’ve got six back on offense. We’ve got six back on defense,” Venables said. “Got punter Michael Turk with our punt returner and Marvin Mims and Eric Gray is our kick returner coming back.

“And then just breaking down the roster another step further, it’s virtually 50 percent of our roster is juniors and seniors, 50 percent are freshman and sophomores. We’ll have 13 graduates, as well, as we kick off the 2022 season.”

Venables is ready to take on the challenge of a team whose fans expect a national championship every year.

“I feel very prepared for this moment,” Venables said. “I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been associated and been a part of programs where to me there’s three Hall of Fame coaches that have influenced me in Bill Snyder at Kansas State, Bob Stoops at Oklahoma, and I know without question that he will be a Hall of Fame coach in Dabo Swinney at Clemson.”

In 1999, OU hired Stoops and he recruited a transfer quarterback, Josh Heupel, that led to a national title in Stoop’s second season. Venables lost OU’s starting quarterback to USC and a former starter to South Carolina. But he recruited quarterback Dillon Gabriel from Central Florida.

“There are certainly parallels in many ways, bringing in an experienced lefty in our first year,” Venables said. \

“But to me it goes back just to the people. You’ve got to be good enough. Dillon Gabriel is a winner. You can’t say it any better than that. He’s thrown for 8,000 yards, completed over 60 percent of his passes, incredible touchdown-to-interception ratio, just a great leader.

“He’s our quarterback. Certainly anything can happen as we move forward through fall camp. It’s always about daily competition. But I feel great I can lay my head down at night knowing not just what he has done on the football field but the quality of the person he is.

“He’s about all the right stuff. He’s dependable. He’s reliable. He’s accountable. He’s humble. He’s one of the hardest workers, shows up early. He’s last one to leave. Always working to improve. And he leads by example, and guys follow him. He’s a galvanizer of people.”

Venables has always been successful wherever he coached, particularly at OU and Clemson. And he had numerous opportunities to be a head coach over the years.

“I learned a long time ago from Bill Snyder, the grass isn’t greener, and I always believed that,” Venables said. “He said it, and I believed it. I wrote it down, and that was in my Coaching Bible 101.

“…Countless opportunities to evaluate new opportunities, but there’s only – this was a very special opportunity for me. Oklahoma has been near and dear to my heart.

“I left in a very emotional state when I left Kansas State to come to Oklahoma, but my last words to Coach Snyder, as I was still learning and I had a ton of growth ahead of me, and as I told Coach Snyder, I wanted an opportunity to coach at a place like Oklahoma.

“It’s a special place. It’s the winningest program in the modern era, the most championships, conference championships in the history of college football with 50, the only program since 2000 that has not had a losing season in the Power Five.”

Venables has a reputation for coaching great defense. OU under former coach Lincoln Riley had great offenses but a porous defense.

What will it be under Venables?

“Do we have to establish some standards at Oklahoma?” Venables asked. “Our standards as an offensive and defensive staff, me as the head coach? Absolutely. That process took place from the moment I took the job.

“You have to rehearse your beliefs. You have to rehearse what your values are. You have to rehearse what your standards are continuously as you nurture and develop a culture of excellence, a culture of great defense, what that looks like.

“So I think it’s important that as we get into our inaugural season that we’ll create a baseline and then we’ll build from there.

“It’s really, once you start playing games, figuring out what your strengths and weaknesses are and then playing to those strengths, protecting your weaknesses and then developing and improving in those areas of weakness.”

OU players expect to win.

“This is a group and this is a locker room that’s used to winning,” Venables said. “Do we need to improve in every area? Absolutely. We’ve got to get better in every area. It’s not just the defense. It’s every single area for us to have the kind of program that we want to have, and that’s discipline, that’s tough, that’s precise, that’s explosive, that’s uncommon effort. It’s being relentless, playing with chemistry and unity and playing for the name across their jerseys.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. There’s no question about it.”

Venables expects consistent progress.

“It’s a process. You have to go through it,” he said. “What I’ve learned I’ve learned from other people, from a scheme standpoint, and so it’s not like you have these magical schemes.

“But we all share in both the success and the failure. We’ve all been diligently putting calluses on those hands and working hard to develop an identity, and again, that’ll continue to be established.

“My expectation as we begin our year and a true measure of success, and I’ve got lots of ways to measure success, but one of the most important measures of success is, all right, where do we start August 4th and where do we end the last week of November? My expectation is improvement, better than when we started.

“Some of it’ll be incremental and some of it won’t be noticeable to the naked eye, and then some of it hopefully it’ll be incredibly transparent.

“That’s when you know that you’re doing things the right way, that you’re better at the end than when you started. It’s pretty simple.”