Why Jim Knowles leaving Ohio State for OU football is unlikely but not impossible

Brent Venables is hard-wired for defense.

Ask the OU football coach about the Sooners’ offense, the struggles on the line or the inconsistency at quarterback, and he is apt to take off on a tangent about the defense.

Bless his heart, that’s just how he is.

Defense, defense, defense.

Which leads us to an interesting question: Would jim Knowles leave Ohio State to coach under Venables at OU?

Venables and the Sooners, as you know, are in the market for a new defensive coordinator. Zac Alleyleft for West Virginia after only one season as OU’s defensive coordinator, and one of the names that keeps popping up is Knowles.

It’d be a heck of a get for the Sooners.

Knowles is in his third season as the Buckeyes’ defensive coordinator after leaving one OSU for another, Oklahoma State to Ohio State, and as you’ve probably heard, things are going pretty well for Knowles. The Buckeyes will play for a national championship on Monday and his defense is the biggest reason why.

Ohio State has the top-ranked defense in all the land.

That OU would be interested in hiring Knowles is not shocking.

But Knowles taking the job?

Now, that would be shocking like a lightning bolt.

Totally unexpected.

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It’s not that OU would be a bad landing spot. By all accounts, the Sooners have a defense able to go toe-to-toe with the behemoths of the SEC, ranking 31st nationally despite playing one of the toughest schedules in the nation this past season. They have the resources. The infrastructure. The tradition.

Then again, the same could be said of Ohio State.

OU does have one other thing: Venables.

He is the main reason the OU defense stands so proud nowadays. When he arrived three years ago, the unit was in shambles. Not good at much of anything other than costing the Sooners games.

Venables changed that, taking an extremely hands-on approach to recruiting, teaching, scheming, planning and playcalling.

And why wouldn’t he?

He knows how to build and run an elite defense. He did it for a decade at Clemson, and of course, he did it even longer at OU when he was Bob Stoops’ defensive coordinator. It would be foolish if Venables didn’t help with the OU defense.

But that might not be all that enticing to Knowles.

His last three bosses — David Cutcliffe at Duke, Mike Gundy at OSU and Ryan Day at Ohio State — have been offensive-minded head coaches. They might poke their head in a defensive meeting now and again, might offer a thought about a halftime adjustment, but they allowed Knowles to do what he does.

He has been king of his domain.

At OU, Knowles would be more in a power-sharing coalition. I don’t have a good sense of how much influence Venables has on the Sooner defense nowadays, though it stands to reason that it’s less now than it was three years ago. His coaches know what he wants, so he doesn’t have to be as hands-on as he once was.

But hands off?

No way.

Knowles would have to be willing to work with that.

And maybe he would be. But really, I can only see that happening under three scenarios.

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Could Jim Knowles leave Ohio State for Oklahoma?

1. Knowles believes the way he’s been doing things could be done even better with another defensive mastermind. This seems the least likely scenario because, hey, can he do much better than the top-ranked defense in the country?

2. Knowles would be compensated handsomely, enough to welcome/stomach/put up with Venables’ involvement. Knowles turns 60 later this year, and he’s only been a head coach once, leading FCS Cornell for six years. That means he never reaped the outsized financial benefits of being an FBS head coach.

He’s well compensated now, making $2.2 million at Ohio State, the third-highest-paid assistant in college football.

But what if OU offered $4 million?

That might sound like crazy money for an assistant, even if he is a coordinator, but that’s the kind of money that could sway a later-in-his-career coach who has never seen the big payday as a head coach.

3. There’s something beyond football that would pull Knowles to OU. This, dear reader, is where things get interesting.

Knowles recently got engaged to a woman who lives in Oklahoma. There are all sorts of pictures on the World Wide Web, and one of the sports folks at Oklahoman World Headquarters confirms the gal went to school in the Oklahoma City metro. He could confirm it because he went to school with her; isn’t this the biggest small town ever?

It’s anyone’s guess how all of this plays into Knowles’ thinking about OU, but seems unlikely that it will be a non-factor.

Still, in the end, the chance of Knowles leaving Ohio State for OU feels slim.

Impossible? No.

Likely? Definitely not.

And the irony is that the thing that feels like the biggest hurdle to Knowles being interested — Venables’ oversight and influence — is the reason OU is even an option at all. No way Knowles would even consider taking over the Sooner defense if it was in the same shape it was a few years ago. But its improvement should at least give Knowles cause to consider the job.

Venables’ fingerprints are all over the defense, but his hands are still on it, too. And when it comes to hiring Jim Knowles, that is a huge hurdle to overcome.

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