Oklahoma routs UTEP 51-0, but Venables wants cleaner tape
John Mateer threw 3 touchdown passes and Oklahoma scored on its first 8 possessions to open 51-0, and Brent Venables still walked away calling it a 41-40 game in his head.
Sooners score on their first 8 possessions, and Venables still isn't satisfied
Oklahoma opened the season by putting up 51 points and allowing zero, scoring on each of its first 8 possessions against UTEP behind a John Mateer debut that looked exactly like the offseason work was supposed to make it look. Mateer completed 11 of 17 passes for 225 yards and 3 touchdowns, none of them cheap — his scoring throws covered 34 yards or more, including a 48-yard strike to Virginia transfer Trell Harris. Lloyd Avant, the Colorado State transfer Venables had been talking up all preseason, ran for 79 yards and a touchdown on 15 carries, and the Sooners finished with 401 total yards before the backups took over. Parker Livingstone, the Texas transfer who'd missed practice time with a concussion, made his own debut in the win, cleared just hours before kickoff — Parker Livingstone cleared to make Oklahoma debut vs UTEP has the full story on how close it came to not happening.
UTEP51-0None of it satisfied Brent Venables. "I felt like this was a 41-40 game, only because I know what we are capable of," he said afterward, per AtoZ Sports — the shutout came with sloppy tackling he called out directly, plus 3 missed UTEP field goals and a fumbled jet sweep that could have turned this into the kind of night he was actually bracing for. It's the same standard he set on the radio this week when he said Oklahoma needed to be "a more explosive offense," not just a clean one — the offense delivered explosive, 8 straight scoring drives worth of it, but the coach spent his press conference talking about the defense instead.
Mateer posted his best quarterback rating as a Sooner in the process, per News9, and true freshman center Noah Best held up well enough in his first career start that Venables praised him unprompted. It was, by any objective measure, exactly the beatdown a No. 10 team was supposed to deliver against a Conference USA opponent — Venables just isn't ready to call it clean yet.
Season-opening shutout‼️
Liam Evans' first career kick came at 44-0, right where Venables put him on scholarship
Liam Evans got his first taste of it Friday night. The backup kicker Venables surprised with a scholarship on his radio show last week — the same show where it came out that Evans had boomed a 68-yard field goal in practice this preseason — jogged onto the field with Oklahoma already up 41-0 and made his first career field goal to push it to 44, per the program's own account.
First career FG for @LiamDEvans05 ✔️ 44-0 Sooners! t.co/14nklyhrsr
It's a small kick in a 51-0 game, but it's the kind of moment the scholarship story was actually about: a walk-on Venables said made the team go "absolutely bananas" when his name got called, getting a real live rep behind Groza Award winner Tate Sandell instead of just a line in a press release. Of the 5 walk-ons who got scholarships that day, Evans is now the second one to actually touch the field in a game that mattered, right behind guard Sean Hutton on the two-deep.
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Before Oklahoma even boards the plane for Michigan, Covers' injury table already has a name on it: running back T. Blaylock, listed Questionable with a hamstring injury. The table doesn't attach a reporter to that, and it reads as a hedge rather than a fact — the comment itself says only that it remains to be established whether he plays, not that he won't.
Avant carried the load against UTEP anyway, so a limited Blaylock wouldn't strand the run game the way it might have a year ago when Oklahoma finished 104th nationally on the ground. Still, a hamstring that's in question the same week as a trip to Ann Arbor is worth watching before it's worth writing off.
Next up: the real test, at Michigan, on September 12
Oklahoma gets less than a week to enjoy the shutout before it plays on September 12 at Michigan, and Venables was already pointing at it in his postgame press conference, warning that "the windows will become smaller and the game will speed up" against a program with more talent than UTEP had. Michigan enters 0-0, but its last game on the books was a 27-41 loss at Texas last season, and the Wolverines have had all offseason to sit with it.
Oklahoma opened as a 1.5-point favorite on the road, with the total set at 46.5 — a number that reads low-scoring for a team that just hung 51 on somebody, and a fair signal that Week 1's blowout conditions aren't expected to repeat in the Big House. If Venables' 41-40 line was a warning aimed at his own locker room, this is the game it was actually about.