Oklahoma’s defense was far from bad last year. Make no mistake though, it wasn’t great either. According to Sports Reference, they were 60th in team defense. Pair that with inconsistent offensive outputs, and it makes up a team that missed out on a chance to win their seventh straight Big 12 title.
Alex Grinch is now at USC preparing his new team for their 2022 campaign. Oklahoma replaced Grinch with a guy whose Clemson team hadn’t finished outside the top 20 in team defense since 2015. Oh, and that year? They finished No. 25 out of 128 teams.
There’s a chance that if Oklahoma had any of that caliber of defense, they would’ve won a national title considering the offensive play they put on the field.
Brent Venables won’t be the defensive coordinator in Oklahoma, but you can bet the defense that you’ll see while he’s the head coach of the Oklahoma Sooners is his defense. Ted Roof will run the defense, but Venables will undoubtedly have his hands in the pot. It’s fast, violent, suffocating, and multiple, and it helped Clemson win national titles in 2016 and 2018.
The Sooners are replacing six defensive starters from a year ago. Nik Bonitto and Isaiah Thomas will be hard to replace, but someone has to. Similarly, for the back end of the defense, where the starting safety duo of Delarrin Turner-Yell and Pat Fields is no more, the Sooners will need to find some answers.
With UTEP coming to town, the Sooners will get to showcase in full just how hard they’ve worked to understand and learn this new defensive scheme. We’ve rounded up some defensive players to watch when the Sooners take on the Miners.