Why Oklahoma’s Brent Venables has ‘always watched’ Auburn’s Hugh Freeze
When Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze and Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables meet at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Week 5 of the 2024 football season, it’ll be a highly anticipated meeting that had been scheduled well in advance.
However, the first time Freeze and Venables met, it was “out of the blue.”
“We ran into each other on a vacation out of the blue with our families a few years back,” Freeze explained during a brief media availability ahead of an Auburn AMBUSH event in Lake Martin on July 2.
On Tuesday afternoon during his first-ever visit to SEC Media Days, Venables revealed that the ironic vacation run-in happened in the Turks and Caicos Islands “a summer or two ago.”
“We found out that we were down there together so we had a quick chat,” Venables continued.
Since then, Freeze and Venables have interacted more as Venables joined other coaches around the league at SEC meetings earlier this year.
However, despite only recently establishing a relationship with one another, Freeze is a guy that’s always been on Venables’ radar.
“I’ve always watched them. I’m always studying offenses. When I’m watching a game, I’m watching the offense most of the time,” said Venables, who served long-term defensive coordinator stints at both Oklahoma and Clemson before being named the Sooners’ head coach in 2021.
“I’m just always looking for good plays that I know are coming because we haven’t seen it all day and Hugh has always been on the front end or cutting edge of the next new great thing offensively and put you in conflict on defense. I’ve got tremendous respect for Hugh and his staff and what he’s doing and has accomplished in his career.”
For Freeze, the respect is mutual.
“I think a lot of him,” Freeze said of Venables in early July. “I think he does things the right way and he’ll have a great football team.”
Auburn and Oklahoma are set to meet between the chalked lines of Pat Dye Field at Jordan-Hare Stadium on Sept. 28, in what will be the Sooners’ first-ever trip to the The Plains, in addition to their first-ever SEC road test.