Maybe Brent Venables should be happy Rick Nagel only said he wasn’t “on the hot seat,” rather than offering a dreaded “vote of confidence.”
Because, as everybody knows, votes of confidence are dreaded precisely because they tend to be the opposite, like the last thing Baghdad Bob might say moments before American tanks enter the square.
Perhaps we need further explanation.
Venables, as you know, is the Sooner football coach, whose team is 5-4 overall, 3-3 in the SEC and set to meet 19th-ranked Ole Miss (6-3, 4-3) at 3:15 p.m. Saturday at Owen Field.
Nagel you may not know, but he outranks Venables and everybody else, because as chair of the Board of Regents he and his board oversee and set policy for the entire university (and two other universities, too).
But now you have to know him because on Wednesday, at the OU Armory on the Oklahoma campus, apropos of nothing, he opened the regents meeting with this statement.
“The board doesn’t typically comment much on what’s going on in the athletic department,” Nagel said. “Maybe that’s a smart thing, but I want to say this, in the midst of what’s been a relatively tumultuous media cycle … first and foremost, that our head coach, Brent Venables, is not on the hot seat.
“There is no hot seat as far as this board is concerned. We just extended [his] contract.”
He was trying to do his coach a solid, but friends like that may only make Venables’ job more difficult, mostly because what he really did was insult the fans and the giveaway is this short passage.
“There is no hot seat as far as this board is concerned. We just extended [his] contract.”
It’s as though he’s telling everybody to quit creating headaches for him and the board, don’t they understand Venables’ contract has been extended, thus he must stay, no matter how many games he loses, no matter how far he sets the program back?
It comes across like a threat.
But wait, there’s more.
After the meeting, reporters got to Nagel and asked him to explain himself.
