BATON ROUGE, LA — Oklahoma’s football season ended Saturday night in the bayou with a quick look at the past and a long look at the future.

After OU finished the year with a 37-17 loss at LSU – putting a miserable end to a miserable 6-6 season – head coach Brent Venables was asked to look at the entire scope of the program and assess where and how it can improve.

First and foremost, Venables said, is hiring a new offensive coordinator.

“Obviously in the next few days we’re going to hire a new offensive coach and fix this,” Venables said. “I think it’s important too. And then we have a signing day in a few days (Wednesday), and the transfer portal is going to open (the following week), and it will be — we will be like for everyone in the country, where will- he ? be a real change.

“And some of it is intentional, and some of it will be a surprise.” It’s just that this is the world we live in. It’s unrestricted free agency. So we’ve been working at the moment, for several months, in anticipation of the signing period and the opening of the transfer portal – and have a good assessment of where we are.

Venables’ bottom line: Oklahoma needs to get better — a lot better — and will have several ways to get there.

“It’s been a constant assessment over the course of the season to identify places from a squad perspective that we need to improve on and improve over the next seven days as well,” he said.

Venables is expected to announce his offensive coordinator perhaps as soon as Sunday, although Monday fits the logistics more closely.

But there will be plenty of talk with rookies about his decision — he’ll no doubt let them know who he chose before Wednesday — and then their signing day will continue the immediate offensive rebuild.

“There’s a lot of careful planning that goes into the topics brought up,” Venables said. “We’ve been working for almost two years with the signing class, and we’re just incredibly excited about the guys signing next week, and we think they’ll be able to have a great opportunity to come in and help us to improve immediately.

“The last few months, you know, we’ve been working on finding the right fit for us from a coaching standpoint, and we think we’re going to be in a great position, a strong position, to make ourselves better with that. higher, so I feel really good about that.

Venables also said he wouldn’t be surprised if current players on this year’s roster came to his office to tell him their decision to enter the transfer portal or stay. It may seem like a narrow window with the season ending Saturday and the gate officially opening a week and a half later, but Venables doesn’t see it that way.

“I don’t think it’s a narrow window for transfers. They actually still have a big window,” he said. “But we’ve been preparing for this for several months, so I won’t be surprised by anything, knowing that there will be some surprises. I expect there to be some, and that’s fine with me.

Venables said he was proud of the improvement players on this year’s team showed throughout the season, while acknowledging that improvement was not linear.

Like throttling Alabama last week in Norman, but losing to Missouri and LSU – who lost to the Crimson Tide by a combined score of 76-13.

Venables often talks about the success of management – ​​and this team clearly hasn’t handled the success of beating Alabama very well. Venables added, however, that he didn’t see Saturday’s inconsistent performance happening during the Sooners’ week of practice.

“It was really good,” he said. “I told them, ‘I wish I could say I told you, like we had crappy practices, we didn’t put in the extra time, or we weren’t invested, we didn’t We had no passion (and) intensity about us all week, or even today,” Venables said. “But that wasn’t it. I think it would just be too easy to blame this. I thought our guys – our leaders – did a great job, our coaches did a really good job, and we just couldn’t get it done tonight.

OU concludes its first season in the SEC with a 2-6 record – its worst conference winning percentage since 1931.

Still, Venables seems resolute — both on this team making immediate progress ahead of a bowl game (which will be announced a week from Sunday) and on embarking on a brighter future.

“I know, without a doubt, that there’s a group of guys on both sides of the ball that have gotten better here over the last half of the season,” he said. “We talked about it a lot and so we continue to do these things.

“We are going to practice for the next few weeks, with the idea that we are going to fundamentally improve the football team through hard work. That’s where progress will come from: putting our heads down and getting back to work, doing the things we need to do to improve, simply by focusing on getting better every day.

“Once again, there is reason to be disappointed in the end. To be disappointed with being (6-6), that’s, you know, way below our standards.

“And so we have a lot of work to do, and I’ve had a lot of work – once we put some of these big decisions and moments and things on our schedule here – you know, go back and look at all areas of our program in which we need to be better.