What do you know about Brent Venables?
Like, what do you really know about Brent Venables?
The surface-level persona is engrossing and enchanting enough.
The love of Clemson and its surroundings, the ability to grasp just how good he and his family have it at the top of the college football mountain even if his name is not at the top of the organizational chart.
The all-consuming focus and fire that is evident not just on game days, but also when he is fully immersed in preparation and concentration on a challenging opponent.
The utter joy he shows after a challenge aced, the pride for and in his players who have given him everything they've had not just physically but mentally.
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The appreciation for the head coach's mandate to luxuriate in the fun that must come with the winning.
The common sight of him losing himself in the moment so thoroughly that there is a get-back coach charged with keeping him from incurring penalties for venturing off the sidelines.
ALSO SEE: The Story Of Brent Venables - Part 4
He looks and acts the part of a maniac, and since he's at Clemson you love him because he's your maniac.
A litany of opposing fans are substantially less enthused to see that guy on the opposing sidelines, gesturing wildly and pumping his fists and yelling as meticulous study of an offense's tendencies culminates in the now-common sight of his players seemingly knowing exactly what's coming.
So the average fan looks at the 48-year-old Thomas Brent Venables and is thoroughly satisfied by the story that has been told thus far, a story of great defenses year after year after year and a story of a man at the top of his profession even if he doesn't occupy the top office in his program.
Venables appears so consummately fueled by his job that it would be logical to conclude he is defined by his job.
But there is so much more to him and his life than that.
In October of 2008, Dabo Swinney sat down with Tigerillustrated.com and told his tumultuous, heartbreaking, heartwarming life story.
Venables recently agreed to open up about his own dysfunctional upbringing, and how he dealt with tragedy that struck when he was well into a successful coaching career.
Some of the details he is sharing for the first time and aren't yet known to most people, including his own boss.
Rather than composing our own take on Venables' story, injecting our own voice and interpretations, we opted to get out of the way and let him tell it all himself.
Here is Part 3 of Brent Venables' life, in his own words:
So Bob Stoops had called me less than a week before the 1998 Big 12 championship and said he was going to Oklahoma, and he wanted me and Mike Stoops to go with him.
I always hated Oklahoma. I mean, I hated them with a passion. Even before I played at Kansas State, I grew up going to games there -- even when they were horrible. So you despised the Sooners, and it was because we were always the little engine that could at Kansas State and Oklahoma was beating up on everybody. In my young life, Oklahoma was one of the benchmarks. It's kind of like Alabama now: You either love them or you hate them. And I hated Oklahoma.
But obviously it was a very intriguing opportunity when Coach Stoops got that job, just the thought of it. Because at Kansas State, no matter how hard you recruited and how much you won, you were always at a disadvantage.
We had so much success under Coach Snyder and had taken the program so far, but we still couldn't get in on any of the elite guys in recruiting.
I remember us beating up on Texas in 1998 in Manhattan. We just stomped them. The score was 48-7, and we totally shut down Ricky Williams. He went on to win the Heisman that year, and against us he ran for 43 yards on 25 carries. That was Mack Brown's first year, and we just stoned them. Ricky got nothing against us, and that's just what we did to people. Other than Nebraska, we shut down just about everyone.
Texas A&M and R.C. Slocum? We humbled them too. The year before, in 1997, they came to Manhattan ranked No. 14 and averaging more than 440 yards of offense. We held them to 90 that day. Ninety yards in an entire game. We beat them 36-17 and had a bunch of tackles for loss. We got a bunch of those tackles for loss after we came up with a zone blitz out of a Bear front and played some Cover 2 behind it. Man, we just killed them. Their offense ran 37 plays the whole game and had the ball for a little over 18 minutes. That 90 yards was the lowest output over Slocum's entire tenure as head coach.
So we were really, really good and had accomplished a ton. We really didn't take a back seat to anyone on the field. And I remember how frustrated I was as a young coach that no matter how hard we worked and how much we achieved, we still couldn't get the elite high school guys. We were still having to subsist on JUCO guys.
No matter what we would say to recruits, no matter the results on the field, we would still lose a guy to Missouri. Or lose a guy to Nebraska. Or lose a guy to Texas. It was just very discouraging that we didn't have a bigger stick, because I had always thought if you win then that puts you in the lead. But it doesn't work that way.
So Oklahoma was very intriguing for that reason, their ability to attract elite recruits. And then, of course, there was the opportunity to work for one of the few mentors I had in Bob Stoops. He is why I got into coaching.
So that was a really agonizing decision for me and Julie in our young life. I was offered the opportunity to stay and get a huge raise and the title of associate head coach while being the sole defensive coordinator, all at the young age of 28 years old.
Mike Stoops and I wanted to do the right thing and stay and coach in our bowl game after that devastating loss to the Aggies in the Big 12 championship. It always bothered me -- and still does to this day -- that Kansas State fans thought we were distracted the week of that game.
I didn't talk to Bob Stoops one time that whole week. And we played well enough to have leads of 10-0, 17-3 and 27-12. A&M just put some new stuff in and we didn't do a good enough job adjusting. They made some plays, and our offense fumbled with a couple of minutes left on third-and-4. Michael Bishop, who was the Heisman runner-up that year and was just an unbelievable player, was trying to get the first down and lost the ball. We were up 27-19 with 2:26 left, and they end up going down and tying it, getting the two-point conversion and then winning in double overtime.
That was as devastated as I've ever been as a coach. And had we won, I don't know that I would've gone to Oklahoma. We would have played Tennessee in the national championship, and we had the best team in the country by a long way. It's hard to say that, but it was just one of those nights against Texas A&M. I think we had five turnovers, and we just didn't do a good job adjusting to some of the new wrinkles they showed us.
So we went to the Alamo Bowl and played Drew Brees and Purdue. One of our receivers, Darnell McDonald, popped off in the opening press conference. He ran his mouth and said, "We're going to some jank bowl to play some jank team." So that's what Purdue heard, and they had a great team. They must have sacked us eight or 10 times. We lost a high-scoring game at the end when our best corner was out with cramps. We rode the train that got us there and played man-to-man on the outside, and Brees threw a perfect pass down the sideline for the game-winner.
The night before that game, Coach Snyder called me up to his room at the hotel. It was probably 11:30 at night, and he wanted me to come up one more time. He wanted to know if I would stay. He said: "Well Brent Venables, are we ready to put this behind us and move forward and start focusing on our future together?" I said: "Coach, I'm just not quite there yet. I'm still going back and forth." I asked him if we could talk after the game.
I remember walking out of his room, going to the elevator and then getting off on my floor. And then something just overwhelmed me. I was crying. I was telling myself: "Man, I need help. I don't know what to do."
Then I looked down at the carpet. It was crimson. I looked at the wallpaper. Crimson. Even the little bench sitting outside the elevator was a crimson color. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I needed a little help, and God winked at me. I went to my room, and Julie was sleeping. She woke up a little bit and asked me how it went. "Do you know what we're doing yet?" she said.
I told her: "We're going to Oklahoma." That's when I knew we were going to Norman.
Our first year at Oklahoma was so hard. There were so many things we needed to change, and it started with attitude and work ethic. They were just a model of dysfunction when we got there. A lot of guys had overinflated opinions of themselves. Some guys who were really highly recruited couldn't play. Just a lot of internal issues, trying to teach guys how to win, how to be a team.
I was coming from a situation at Kansas State that was the exact opposite. We had some unbelievable players on our defense at Kansas State, some unbelievable kids. We didn't have many off-the-field problems at all at Kansas State.
We had a great family atmosphere there, a brotherhood. And I'd had some great linebackers. One of them, Mark Simoneau, is in the College Football Hall of Fame. All three of them, including Jeff Kelly and Travis Ochs, were first-team All-Big 12 two years in a row. Kelly was a first-team AP All-American. Simoneau was from a small town in Kansas. Kelly was a guy I signed out of junior college and was the Big 12 newcomer of the year in 1997. Then Simoneau was the Big 12 defensive players of the year two years later. Man, those three linebackers were big time and we had an unbelievable defense in 1996, 1997 and 1998. In 1995 we were No. 1 in the country in defense. I mean we were really, really good those four years.
So I had spent a lot of time investing and developing that at Kansas State, and then we had to start all over at Oklahoma. Leaving Kansas State was incredibly hard, but I just felt like it was something I needed to do. I wasn't ready to be a coordinator yet. I needed to continue to learn and grow. I had a lot of confidence that Coach Stoops was the leader I needed to help me develop in those ways.
That first year in Norman was so hard that there were many times I'd say to myself: "Man, I want to go back to Kansas State." It was just such a negative atmosphere with those kids.
But looking back, dealing with that at Oklahoma was a great learning experience for me as a coach. I wasn't at Kanas State when Bill Snyder first got there and started turning around that wreck and changing the culture; I was two years later, and I was on the players' side and not the coaches' side. So I had somewhat of an understanding, but not the depth that I needed. So Oklahoma was my first time trying to turn something around to that degree.
Oklahoma hadn't gone to a bowl game in five years. Oklahoma. After Barry Switzer left they had gone through Gary Gibbs, then Howard Schnellenberger, then the disaster under John Blake. When we took over in 1999, they hadn't had a winning season since 1993. That's just crazy to think about.
That first year, we were 7-4 going into the Independence Bowl against Ole Miss. Deuce McAllister was the running back. We were down 21-3 at halftime but we came back and went up 25-24 on a touchdown with 2:17 left. And we're feeling like we're going to win the game.
McAllister was a great kick returner, and we had been kicking off to him the whole game and stoning him every time. That was just who Coach Stoops was: He wasn't going to back down from any challenge. He was from Youngstown, Ohio, and he just had that Youngstown edge to him: "What did you say to me? Say it one more time." He just had that chip on his shoulder. We called him the Riverboat Gambler, and Bullet Bob. You name it, man, he was ready for a fight at the drop of a hat. And ready for a challenge at the drop of a hat. So we were kicking it right to McAllister. We were almost insulted at that thought that we needed to kick it away from that guy, or anyone.
So we had kicked it away from him the whole game, and after our go-ahead touchdown we were talking on the sideline and asking ourselves: "Do we bloop it? Do we squib it? What are we going to do?"
But that's not who we were. We said: "Let's kick it to him." So we kicked it to him, and man he brought that thing back 42 yards. Just past the 50. They got it in field-goal range and they made a 39-yard kick on the last play to beat us 27-25 on New Year's Eve.
We're on the bus going back to the hotel and we're going over this bridge in Shreveport. All these fireworks are going off everywhere outside, and the bus was really quiet. Coach Stoops looks at me and he says: "You know what, Vinnie? This is going to be good for us. We went 7-5 and then lost this last game. We don't want everybody to feel too good from winning too much too soon. We'll be all right." That was his perspective. And sure enough, the next year we go 13-0.
That 2000 season was just an unbelievable year that came out of nowhere. We had a group of talented guys, and we had a number of guys that were just misfits. And we got better and better as the year went on. Josh Heupel was the Heisman runner-up, and Chris Weinke and Florida State were unstoppable and had all these high-draft-pick guys. Nobody gave us a chance. I think we were two-touchdown underdogs going into that BCS championship game.
I think FSU might have crossed the 50 one time that night in the Orange Bowl. We played Cover 2 and stoned them. We had a couple of zone blitzes, we had a zero blitz and Mike Stoops had put together a great game plan. We beat them 13-2. Our guys just played out of their minds. Man, that was just an unbelievable night. Unbelievable.
That was a great, great run. We had a number of years in there that we played for the national championship. We had some incredible defenses in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.
Late in the 2003 season, Mike Stoops got the head job at Arizona. He stayed on for the Big 12 championship, but after that he left and the national championship against LSU was the first game I was by myself calling the defense.
We went into that Big 12 championship against Kansas State undefeated, and some people were saying we were the best team in the history of college football. We were just killing everybody. The closest game we had was in the second game, at Alabama. We beat them 20-13, but after that our closest margin of victory was 14 points over Colorado. Texas was No. 11 when we played them in the Red River Rivalry, and we beat them 65-13. A few weeks later, we beat No. 14 Oklahoma State 52-9. We beat Texas A&M 77-0.
Mike takes the Arizona job in late November, and we still had two weeks to get ready for the Big 12 championship. So he came back and that championship game against Kansas State was his last game.
That Kansas State team had no business being on the same field as us, but they beat us 35-7. They just outplayed us. We knew going in that we were going to play in the BCS title game regardless. All the computers and all that said we were going to New Orleans win or lose against Kansas State. So we just thought it was going to be easy, and we got smoked. We didn't have an edge, and K-State did. We just got destroyed.
So that game against Nick Saban and LSU, basically a home game for them, was the first game I ever called by myself. It was hard for Mike to be two places at once, so he decided to move on. We lost that game 21-7, and I think Marcus Spears had a pick-6. We played them tough, and I learned a lot just as a play-caller through that experience. Tough game, because we could have won it. They played 2-man the whole game, and we finally started running the ball in the fourth quarter and drove into their red zone. We had them on their heels, but we just barely overthrew the running back down the seam on a zero blitz. He was wide open and I think it was a fourth-down play. So the game was over after that.
That loss was hard, and so was the Big 12 championship. But not nearly as hard as what I was about to go through with my mom.
I'll back up for a moment, back to late in my high school career. After my junior year, she decided she was tired of living that way. She decided she wanted to help people and she wanted a real job. So she went back to college. For three years, she went through nursing school and kept a part-time job. She had a small inheritance from both my grandmother and grandfather passing away, so she could make do financially. She was with the second Jim at that time. So she put herself through college and got a bachelor's degree.
Man, that moment was so special. Seeing her get her degree easily trumps any national championship or anything else I've been a part of, other than watching my children being born. To go back home and see her walk across that stage at that ceremony, I was just incredibly proud of her. So it was after my freshman year of college when she earned that degree.
She was a psychiatric nurse after that, and she just absolutely loved her job. Just loved it. She loved helping people. She loved being able to put the name tag on and make it official and help people in so many ways -- the crazy people. My brothers and I would say that it was right where she needed to be, because she had a lot of experience dealing with crazy people, for sure. And now she was getting paid to do it. That was just a super cool part of her life.
But on the other end of the spectrum, I always worried about something bad happening. I always worried that there was going to be bad news around the corner. When you get older and move away from home, you live in a state of fear because you know the dysfunction is still there a little bit. I just always worried about that phone call.
Well, I got that call in January of 2005. We were coming off a humiliating loss to Southern Cal in the BCS title game, 55-19 against a truly great Trojans team with Matt Leinart and all those elite players Pete Carroll had recruited.
My mom called and said she had lung cancer. It was Stage 4, and she told me she had six months to live. At the time, the gravity of it didn't really hit me. I was thinking: "I've got a good job. I've got money. I can help. We can get treatment and knock this thing out." She probably didn't really grasp the full seriousness of it either at the time. I told her: "We've got this."
At this point, my mom needed me more than ever. For all the encouragement she always gave me, the can-do attitude and the positivity she always projected, now it was my time to provide the same qualities and the same support.
Just before that, Jim had also been diagnosed with cancer. He had first been diagnosed with lung cancer a couple years before, but he underwent surgery and the doctors thought they had removed it all. But they later found another spot on his brain. So mom had been taking care of him for a couple of months. I didn't know how bad it was, but it was getting progressively worse. When I came home to Salina, I discovered how bad Jim's cancer was. So we decided to put him in a facility where he could get the right kind of care and my mom could start helping herself.
Coach Stoops told me: "You go do whatever you've got to do. We've got this here." So I left Norman, and for the next few months I was in Salina trying to help my mom. Her siblings came in from Denver to help. Coach Stoops, even when we were trying to pick up the pieces from that loss to Southern Cal, let me skip spring recruiting. That's something that not a lot of head coaches would have allowed me to do.
Bob Stoops has always been that way. He and his family, they'll give you the shirt off their back. Bob, Mike, Mark. I lived with Mike for over a year, rent-free. They'll do anything for anybody. Their mom Dee lived in Youngstown but was at every game. They have a huge family.; Bob is one of six children. They're unbelievable people. Bob is a guarded guy publicly, much different from Coach Swinney. Coach Swinney is very transparent and open, and Bob is a lot different. But behind the scenes, he's every bit as much of a giver. He and his wife Carol are just such quality, amazing people.
Once we figured out how bad it was, I looked at my mom and asked her what we were going to do. She said, "What do you think I should do?" We were talking about different treatments and such, and right there the moment just froze. Everything crystallized for me: She needed me to stay there and help her fight.
At that point, I tell her: "We're going to destroy this thing. We're going to mow right through this." She says, "All right! That's what I wanted to hear!" That was a cool moment, just to see her excitement as a result of the encouragement I was giving her. She was just looking for a reason to believe we could do this, a reason it was possible to beat it. She needed me as a source of strength.
We decided that we needed mom closer to us in Norman anyway, and so we planned to move her and Jim down. One of the coaches on our staff at Oklahoma ran a full-care facility two blocks from our house in Norman. It was a really nice, brand-new facility.
So for the spring, everything was focused on getting her and Jim from Salina to Norman. I missed the entire spring recruiting period. I did go back for a few weeks for spring football, and during that time I'd go back and forth. Salina was about three-and-a-half hours from Norman, so it was very manageable. I'd go take her to her appointments. We just spent a lot of good, quality time together during that period.
So we sold mom's house and moved her down to Norman and she lived with us. Julie being a nurse, she was able to help. And she was just awesome in giving my mom comfort and happiness and everything else. If you've ever been around anyone with that type of cancer that's that far along, they'll have great days and then really bad days. We went through that cycle and all the normal issues that you have. My mom could still get around. She was as tough as nails.
Just before the 2005 season started, Jim passed away in his full-care facility. He was 70 years old, and he suffered a stroke and died July 21. The hardest thing I've ever had to do was not tell my mom that he was gone, because I didn't want to have her go into a downslide. Because attitude is so important when you're trying to fight through that. We had been bringing him to the house to see her, and taking her over to his facility to visit. But after he passed away we just kind of made up some excuses. Regretfully, we didn't tell her right away. To us, it was for her own good.
So then the 2005 season started, and I'd have quiet time with my mom every night after getting home from work around 9:30 or 10. She'd be waiting up for me, sitting up in the bed. We'd talk about the day, and she was always asking about my day and the team and what was going on this week and who we were playing, all that. She was around my boys, Jake and Tyler, during that time. Jake was 6 and Tyler was 4. And that was really cool for me and for her, to be a part of their lives and vice-versa.
Then on a Sunday or a Monday, she had made enchiladas for dinner. That was her favorite dish she would make for us. So she seemed to be doing pretty well. But the cancer was just too far along. It had really been getting worse, but I didn't know it because Julie kept it from me. The cancer had spread to her bones and her brain.
She passed away the week we played Nebraska in October of 2005. She was 58. That's kind of a sick way to remember something so important by associating it with a game, but it was the Monday night of Nebraska week in the last week of October.
Julie had told my brothers and my aunts, and they came into town. I thought they were all coming just to see mom. Some of them got there the day before, and then my brother Kirk got there after she had passed away. I think that was really, really hard on him because he couldn't get there in time. She died at 4 AM, and I was at a staff meeting four hours later. I knew my family was there, and I knew I had to keep going and focus on the next thing. I learned that from her.
For me, that whole experience was just an awesome opportunity. What a gift from God to allow Julie and I and our family to have time together and give her comfort and happiness and laughter and love while she deserved it. In the darkest time of her life, we were there to try to give her hope. Seeing her battle, and being able to help her battle without her wanting anything, gave me great clarity on my life. It refocused my priorities with my faith, my family and my job -- in that order. I recognized what was valuable to me.
That was really tough, losing both my mom and Jim within three months of each other. It was hard on all of us, and I know it was really hard on Kirk and Ken both. I was on the sideline in Lincoln a few days after losing my mom, but she would have slapped me silly if I didn't keep going. We won that game 31-24. Pouring myself into the season allowed me to protect myself after she passed away. After the season is when it all finally sank in.
The next summer, in 2006, we had a family reunion in Winter Park, Colo. We rented boats and spread mom's and Jim's ashes on Grand Lake.
That next season wasn't easy on the field because our defense slipped some. Early that season, we were ranked 97th on defense and people were saying our defense wasn't the same without Mike Stoops after he left for Arizona.
About four years later, Kirk had a few more episodes related to his alcoholism. He was at a hospital in Denver with alcohol poisoning, and I was determined to get him to Oklahoma. Some friends of mine were the chief investors in a full-care rehab facility, an awesome facility out in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma.
It took a one-man intervention by me to get Kirk out of Colorado and into that facility. I flew into Denver and told him: "You're coming with me. I've got your plane ticket, and you're coming." Man, he was so angry. There were some counselors there and they were trying to talk to him. He didn't want to talk to them. He was saying they were crazy people. And then I got there and he was even angrier. He told me: "What are you doing here? I ain't listening to you. You're crazy."
That was a first for me, taking control of a situation with my oldest brother and telling him what he was going to do. I had always been afraid of him. But this time, man, he listened. He didn't really want to go, but he agreed to go. First he agreed to leave the hospital and come with me to the airport Marriott for the night. And man, I didn't sleep one second that night. So then the next day I got him to agree to get on the plane. I told him he was just going away for three weeks, when in actuality it was going to be three months. He wouldn't even agree to do the three weeks. But once I got him to that facility, I stayed with him for probably two or three hours trying to get everything situated and the paperwork signed.
So then I had to tell him about the three months. I was afraid to even ask the question, because I was afraid he'd say no way. But he said he would. And then we talked on the phone every day. And then over the first few weeks, there was just this noticeable change in him. I had never had more excitement than at that time with how proud I was of him. He was legitimately trying to step into the ring and fight.
My sons and I would go out and see him every Saturday. It was about a 90-minute drive to go see him. And man, we had the best time. I got closer to my brother than I had ever been in my life. It was the damndest, coolest thing. My sons got to see him when he was in a really good place mentally, sober, so that was great for them. We'd play games. We'd go running. We competed. We did all kinds of fun stuff. There was just a lot of fun stuff to do. And of course there were a bunch of Oklahoma fans at the facility, so we had a lot of good fellowship and devotional time. Had a lot of great meals together. Just a really great time in our relationship.
His last day there was graduation, and seeing other people who were going through the same thing was so powerful. You live your life in such a way where you're not exposed to these real-life issues that are going on with other people. It made me realize that we weren't the only family going through this.
