On Monday, Sooner offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle, after 21 games on the job, was let go, canned, fired by the University of Oklahoma.
Later that day, the man who should have been fired instead, but who signed a less-than-a-month-old contract pushing the cost to fire him from about $25.2 million to about $51.7 million, Brent Venables, appeared on his coach’s show at Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q.
Also later that day, but who’s counting, the picked-to-finish-last-in-the-Southland Conference East Texas A&M Lions, inside Lloyd Noble Center, beat OU 68-64, likely the program’s worst loss since Division III non-scholarship Ohio Northern topped Billy Tubbs’ Sooners 72-69 on Dec. 23, 1990.
Oh, yeah, the man who signed Venables to his new contract, OU athletics director Roger Denny, is also the man whose first order of business upon arriving in Norman last February was to retain Porter Moser as OU’s men’s hoops coach.
The blind, leading the blind, leading the blind.
Let us hope tight ends impresario Jason Witten, who’s been a college football coach for less than one season, this one, will know what he’s doing in the interim OC and play-calling role he’ll inherit, for he is Venables’ hope to succeed where Arbuckle failed.
It surprised me, too, it wasn’t Kevin Wilson, who remains on staff and who previously coordinated some of the Sooners’ very best offenses, from 2006-2010, but perhaps wanted no greater role on the most sinking of ships.
On the other hand, it was Venables who foisted Witten and a trove of new-to-the-program tight ends to the program last offseason, signifying a switch in offensive philosophy, toward the physical, hard-nosed style such a trove might trigger, initiated least of all by Arbuckle, the offensive coordinator.
Stunning it hasn’t worked.
It’s an indictment.
Not on Arbuckle so much as everybody else.
