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Football is not life and death, but sometimes it can feel pretty close to the latter for coaches with certain personality types.

Brent Venables probably still has emotional scars from the time he got to the BCS title game three times in a six-year stretch and lost all three.

Oklahoma had come out of nowhere in 2000 when Bob Stoops and Venables were in their second season with the Sooners. They somehow held the Florida State offensive monster scoreless in a 13-2 Orange Bowl triumph that announced a new member of the elite hierarchy.

Three years later, they were ambushed by LSU in essentially a home game for the Bayou Bengals at the Superdome. The year after, they faced one of the most terrifying offenses in college football history and were drubbed 55-19 by Southern Cal. And then in 2008, back in the Orange Bowl, all they had to do to win a national title was get past Tim Tebow, Percy Harvin and a Florida program under Urban Meyer that was the gold standard then. They gave the Gators all they could handle and lost 24-14.