Brent Venables among Kirk Herbstreit’s best head coaches from week 3

ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit has Oklahoma’s Brent Venables as his No. 5 best performing head coach of week three

Each week, former Ohio State QB and ESPN Analyst Kirk Herbstreit releases his list of top performing head coaches. For the first time, Oklahoma Sooners head coach Brent Venables made the cut at No. 5 on week three’s edition of the list.

Venables’ placement isn’t the most interesting thing on this list, however. It’s who ranks ahead of him. Texas’ Steve Sarkisian is at the top of the list after the Longhorns took down UTSA.

While the Longhorns did have a lot going against them after their week two loss to Alabama, such as the injury to star QB Quinn Ewers, putting Sarkisian at the top after beating a Conference USA team at home seems like a bit much.

Here’s the full list:

In my humble opinion, Lance Leipold should be at number one on this list every week the Jayhawks win a game. Having him behind Sarkisian and Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman, after beating Cal, is just wrong.

Leipold was not on week one or week two’s edition of Herbstreit’s top performing head coaches. Leipold’s Jayhawks beat Houston on the road pretty convincingly.

Moving back to Venables, he did have a very good game against Nebraska. The way he kept the team focused after falling behind early on the road is something that Sooners fans haven’t seen in Norman for awhile.

The early returns on what Venables has done for the OU defense have been very good. The Sooners rank inside the top 20 in sacks, tackles for loss and scoring. This is less than a year removed after having the 70th ranked scoring defense under Alex Grinch.

Venables will go up against both Sarkisian and Leipold in the coming weeks as the Sooners enter conference play.

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