NORMAN, Okla. — Seven minutes into an answer about what he wants his program to become, Brent Venables bounces from his sofa chair and heads to the table in front of his desk, grabbing a memento that’s almost always in sight and never out of mind.

Shortly after taking this job, the new Oklahoma head coach bought an hourglass. In an office decorated with a pair of big-screen TVs on either end, a wall of school-issued Jordan sneakers in one corner and a coffee table featuring more commemorative bowl game watches than anyone cares to count, the hourglass, fittingly, just means more.

“That’s a reminder right there,” Venables says. “Just as a reminder that whether it’s players or whether it’s staff, it’s coaches, we’ve got to be intentional. We’re not getting that time back. Make ‘em all count.

“So I just use that thinking about going to the SEC: You’re on the clock. It’s coming. It’s happening. So you better get ready. That’s very, very exciting.”

The letters S-E-C had not come up in 30 minutes of conversation beforehand, but in some ways it doesn’t need to be spoken aloud here. An air of change can be felt throughout the Switzer Center, and not just because there is a new CEO of Sooners football.

It’s not every day that a head coach voluntarily leaves the fifth-winningest program in college football history. It’s not every day that a program of this stature can turn to yet another head coach without any previous experience at the position and expect to continue chasing conference and (eventually) national championships.

And no, it’s not every day that a program can reasonably still pursue those goals while building toward something bigger and better down the line.

“You’re going into the lion’s den,” Venables says, “and you get one chance. It’s like we tell the players: If a player is considering going to the NFL, you get one shot to go to the NFL. You get one shot to go in the front door. One first impression. So make sure that you’re ready, completely and totally equipped.

“To me that’s no different than what we’re doing. You get one shot to go into the SEC. Let’s make sure that we’re fully equipped when we do. Don’t go in here and try to figure it out; you’re gonna get baptized. So we’re working tirelessly really since we got here for that, whenever that is, down the road, because that’s coming.”

Baptism by fire is the best way to describe a Venables practice. It’s an unseasonably warm April morning, and the handheld microphone he holds as he barks out orders is about as effective at controlling his intensity as his get-back coach was while he was at Clemson.

Perhaps no active coach can yell — continuously, intensely, purposefully yell — the way Venables seemingly can forever. That he now uses a mic to direct units off the field, to call out pad levels and to criticize punts is comically unnecessary, but that also misses the point.

“I love it,” tight end Brayden Willis says. “It’s a hard game. It’s a game that starts to feel the same after a while, and after you get to practicing a little bit, spring practice can be a grind, and you need that type of energy to get you going every day. And so it’s been really a blessing because if the head coach brings it, who am I not to bring it as well? So it gets all of us fired up, juiced up and ready to go, and it turns into great practices and great work for us.”

Says Sooners legend Roy Williams, who played for Venables at Oklahoma more than 20 years ago: “He’s only gotten wiser. He’s still fiery. He’s still that same coach that’s going to beat you waking up in the morning, going to beat you in the gym getting a workout in. He’ll be, if not first, then a top-five strongest person on the team. Coach lifts. He’s no joke. But he’s a coach that leads by example, and excuses aren’t an option.”

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But that competitive edge is not all that will make Venables an effective head coach. Nor is it all that will make Oklahoma compete regularly with Alabama and Georgia in future years.

At an early age, Venables began what turned into a career-long pursuit for a healthy on- and off-field learning experience well before that became a mission statement across the sport. He attempts to coach players through their hearts, building the type of personal connections that make those mic-aided rants hit in a way that generates the kind of response that coaches and players desire.

“You’ve got to listen, and taking action is a whole ’nother conversation,” Venables says with conviction. “And that’s organically just a part of just mentoring and loving and encouraging and leading and guiding and not letting recruits put all the chips on ball, and wrap their identity around all about football. Football is important. But you can’t play the game forever. You’ve got to be prepared for what’s next. But you have to make it a priority. … So Clemson to me was affirmation of what I already knew. We’re missing the boat.”

Venables learned this lesson first-hand while playing for Bill Snyder at Kansas State. Venables was a productive player, earning honorable mention All-Big Eight honors at linebacker. And Snyder was in the early stages of building one of the most impressive coaching tenures in all of college football.

But something was missing — something Venables couldn’t quite articulate at the time.

“When I was a player, I went to coach Snyder and I said we needed that,” Venables says of off-the-field development. “I didn’t know what that was, but there’s so many guys — I spoke on behalf of all the players — I said, ‘We don’t know what to do. Nobody’s really told us what’s next.’ Like, we’re graduating and we’ve had all this structure and all this accountability. Nobody’s prepared us. You had to go in the middle of campus, and go do it on your own. But we didn’t have time to do it.”

Venables spent six seasons coaching for the Wildcats after graduating before Bob Stoops hired him to his first Oklahoma staff in 1999. His 13 seasons with the Sooners were fruitful. Heck, that stretch was what made him such a natural to come back and take the job this year. But he brought the same discussion to Stoops at times and he had similar trouble getting through.

“It just never got any legs,” Venables says. “I’m just the assistant. He’s got to be the vision for it. ‘We’re football coaches,’ and I’m like yeah, but there’s something that’s (missing). The connection’s not there. And that was like a big thing for me for a good while while I was here. And I knew we were really good, but in my own personal space, we were dysfunctionally good. That’s how I looked at it.”

When Dabo Swinney phoned him after Clemson’s defense suffered a 70-point branding from West Virginia in the 2011 Orange Bowl, Venables was intrigued, arriving on a Friday night with his wife, Julie, who ended up hitting it off with Swinney’s wife, Kathleen.

Venables took in that Saturday the way a recruit would. He listened closely to the Tigers’ staff presentation. He became overwhelmed. He had what he calls a “spirit-led moment.” He looked around the room, as if he wanted to share a secret that he had been hiding for 20-some years, since he first suggested to Snyder that he and his teammates needed more off-the-field guidance than the sport was giving them.

“This is it,” Venables said to himself, setting off a decade in which he would help Swinney launch the sport’s next dynasty.

For much of his career, Thad Turnipseed has been the guy behind the guy. A linebacker on Alabama’s 1992 national championship team whose career was cut short due to knee injuries, Turnipseed turned into a visionary of sorts. He once ran a construction company, but he sold it in order to return to his alma mater and do some building there. Before long, he endeared himself to Nick Saban, serving as the coach’s right hand for the latter part of his 11-year tenure in Tuscaloosa. When Swinney, one of his old Crimson Tide teammates, offered a blank canvas to make Clemson better, Turnipseed took the job and did just that, revitalizing the Tigers’ recruiting efforts and propelling the program into the same stratosphere as Alabama.

Now he is at Oklahoma as the director of football administration, having followed Venables for an opportunity that he says was too good to pass up. It’s an attitude that’s reflected in the way he tours the Sooners’ operations center — not yet five years old — and pictures all of the modern enhancements that can still be done, especially as it gears up for a move to the SEC.

He is a dreamer. And he has made a habit of turning those dreams into reality everywhere he’s been.

Asked why he came, Turnipseed speaks about the unique opportunity to win a national title at a third school and to potentially do it in a third conference.

But he is not here to help Oklahoma re-start its reign over the rest of the Big 12. He is here to make sure the Sooners are ready to compete at the highest level. That means working with every bone of the university body to make sure the athletic and academic units are ready from a financial, travel, staff and branding standpoint.

Oklahoma’s football staff is significantly bigger now than it was a year ago. There is not a hard number to put on it simply because that number is constantly evolving, and not all of the hires have been officially announced. (Former Texas Tech coach Matt Wells and ex-NFL quarterback JP Losman are already in the building in support staff roles.)

“There are things to be done, and the administration has been great to work with,” Turnipseed says. “And I think it’ll be a process that’s going to take a couple of years to get to the — not only to the SEC, but to the Alabama level of the SEC. Because we’re very good here right now. But it’s just the mindset of always wanting to be the best and everything matters … is kind of what everybody’s buying into right now.”

There is a more direct answer, however, to why the 50-year-old Turnipseed took on this challenge. And that answer reminds him of the seven-time national title winner he used to work for.

“Brent Venables,” Turnipseed says. “I’ve always said for nine years, he’s the closest thing to Nick Saban I’ve ever seen. I say that meaning his passion for the game, his passion for being a ball coach. He truly enjoys recruiting, and you can’t probably count on two hands and two feet how many coaches actually love recruiting. But he’s one of them. Passionate about it, just like Nick Saban. But then Dabo made us both better people. We were never mean people. We were always friendly people. Just watching him, truly the love, care and serve philosophy that he has, a lot of that culture we’re bringing with us.”

He adds: “I truly believe he’ll be the face of college football, the new face here shortly.”

That Clemson-fying of Oklahoma shows itself in more ways than the simple “Best Is The Standard” mantra that hangs above the Sooners’ weight room, a slogan the Tigers had coined under Swinney. Where Swinney’s program started the P.A.W. Journey (Passionate About Winning), Venables’ Sooners players will take on the S.O.U.L. Mission (Serving Our Uncommon Legacy).

Such programs mimic what Venables couldn’t quite articulate as a player, the same kind of holistic development path that was among the biggest reasons Clemson’s transfer rate remained so low in the era of the portal and instant eligibility elsewhere.

“This place is going to win football games, but there’s a bigger picture out there,” says longtime assistant Cale Gundy, who’s now coaching receivers. “And Brent has done a good job teaching us of how we need to go about really reaching these players and young men, and to be getting the very best out of them every single day.

“I’ve said this before, I’ve told coaches here, I told coach Stoops, I’ve said it publicly: Since I’ve been here — the last 24 years coaching and my four years before that playing — in my opinion, Oklahoma football is in a better place than it’s ever been. Because of what we’re doing for our players and with our players.”

Down the road is the SEC. Here and now is a 51-year-old, first-time head coach who made more money last year than half of the nation’s head coaches, a man who was content to be Swinney’s most trusted assistant for however long circumstances dictated it.

That ended up being 10 years, and it’s easy to envision that run as Clemson’s defensive coordinator stretching even longer had Lincoln Riley not shocked the college football world by leaving Oklahoma for USC in November. Venables made $2.5 million last season in Death Valley. He coached a defense that, even in a relatively down year, finished in the top-10 in most major categories, and a unit that projects to be even better in 2022. His youngest son, Tyler, will be a junior safety with the Tigers this fall.

Always, Venables told those close to him, he would only leave for a destination that was dedicated to winning a national championship. Plenty of schools say they want that, but how many truly have the infrastructure in place to chase that prize? Auburn, winner of the 2010 national title, runner-up for the 2013 title and a fickle beast in plenty of years since then, made an aggressive-enough play for Venables a year earlier that several of his Clemson colleagues thought he was gone.

He stayed. Auburn ended up going 6-7, and, amid public embarrassment, dragged out the fate of the coach it did hire, Bryan Harsin, till mid-February.

Crisis averted for Venables. But Clemson also closed the regular season at 9-3, missing the College Football Playoff for the first time in seven years. How could anyone be so sure the right opportunity would one day arrive?

“I didn’t think that Oklahoma would ever come open before I retired,” Venables says. “This is one I thought was going to be in great hands for a good long time.”

Now it’s in his hands, and to hear Joe Castiglione tell it, the fact that Venables hasn’t run his own program before — like both of his predecessors — is of little concern.

“Obviously, his pedigree is phenomenal,” the longtime Oklahoma athletic director says. “He’s got double, if not triple, the prep pedigree that some have in getting a head-coaching job.

“He reminded me of a coach I hired earlier in my career named Bob Stoops.”

Stoops won it all in his second year. Riley was right there in his first year. Venables is quick to recite his notable records at Clemson against the SEC — 3-0 vs. Auburn, 2-0 vs. Texas A&M, 2-2 vs. Alabama, 1-1 vs. LSU, 1-2 vs. Georgia, 7-0 in his last seven against South Carolina — which serves as a another reminder of his having been there and done that. (Castiglione says there is no current movement from the July 1, 2025 entry date for Oklahoma to officially join the SEC.)

The Sooners have lost a lot from last year’s 11-win outfit, but legitimate Big 12 contention is a reasonable first-year goal, even if no one wants to speak in such terms just yet. Those who did stay, though, along with the transfers from elsewhere who joined them, heard and saw enough in a short period of time to buy in to what Venables is building.

“It made my decision really easy to come back,” said Willis, who opted in for a fifth season. “I knew that I wanted to grow as a player and I just wanted to see who they brought in and get to know him and get to know him on a personal basis.

“Yeah, right off the bat. I knew he was different. I (knew) he would be able to pour into me and make me better in all aspects. Not even just in football, just a better man.”

No one is shying away from expectations, be it in the Big 12 or SEC. Swinney took over what he believed was a sleeping giant in the ACC at Clemson, speaking boldly of plans to become the sport’s model program, enduring tough early losses and tons of dismissive laughs, and then guiding the Tigers to become just that.

Swinney succeeded at Clemson by taking the best of Alabama and tailoring it to his personality. Venables plans to succeed at Oklahoma by taking the best of Snyder, Stoops, Swinney and — via Turnipseed — Saban and tailoring it to his persona. That’s two sitting Hall of Famers and two future Hall of Famers, at a place that has won six of the past seven Big 12 titles under two different leaders.

Hard as it may be to believe based on his demeanor, Venables has actually given thought to what his life would be like without a whistle and a clipboard. For a period of time while younger, he thought he might pursue law. He loved to argue, loved to strategize, loved to connect with individuals. Most of all, he could fight for a result.

He gets all that now as a head coach, and if he is successful, perhaps he could one day make good on his retirement plan: working at a home improvement outlet.

“I love the smell at Home Depot and Lowe’s because it’s new, you’re building something,” he says. “You go in there, whether it’s fertilizer and you’re doing landscape or you smell the fresh-cut wood, it smells good.”

The analogy to his current task is as subtle as a sledgehammer — or as the hourglass he looks up at from his desk every single day.

(Top photo: Alonzo Adams / USA Today)