Venables calls 5-star OU pledge 'not committed' after Texas A&M visit plans surface

Brent Venables all but unilaterally removes five-star OT commit from list after plans to visit Texas A&M and Longhorns come to light

As Texas A&M football fans well know, the recruiting game can be a fickle one. Teams and fans can be under the impression that a guy is 100% pot committed to your program, only for the winds to shift the next day and him to end up pledging somewhere else.

In the era of the transfer portal and NIL, things can be even more treacherous. You have to remain competitive on the field if you want to keep your top pledges in the fold, but you also have to be competitive on these new fronts.

One team that failed to meet that first condition this season is the Oklahoma Sooners. Currently sitting at 5-5 and staring right down the barrel of an 0-2 finish against Alabama and LSU, Brent Venables's squad is in a bad way right now.

As you might expect, then, some of the top commits currently pledged to Oklahoma are beginning to look elsewhere. Chief among these is five-star tackle Michael Fasusi, who the Aggies have been recruiting for quite some time.

Fasusi's plans to visit both Austin and College Station in the coming weeks recently came to light, and Venables was none too happy about it. Perhaps it's the influence of his old boss Dabo Swinney—who famously did not allow commits to take other visits—but something compelled the OU head man to flap his gums pretty inadvisably.

I guess the Longhorns and Aggies should consider themselves as currently recruiting an uncommitted player, then?

I'm really not sure what Venables thought he stood to gain with this gambit. Did he think the five-star would come back into the fold, tail tucked? Did he think this would make him look good on the national stage?

Whatever his reasoning, this is a bad look for a coach. It just makes him seem generally unaware of how things work in the recruiting game at best, and strangely controlling at worst.