Brent Venables is considered one of the best defensive players in college football, which dates back to his time as a dominant defensive coordinator at Clemson. Having said that, Oklahoma The defense will face a tough challenge this weekend, Josh Heupel And Tennessee come to the city.

The Vols led the nation in offense through the first three games of the season, scoring over 63 points per game.

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Former Alabama Coach and current ESPN analyst Nick Saban was a guest on the Pat McAfee Show on Friday and discussed how Venables and Oklahoma can try to slow down Tennessee.

“I think Oklahoma has a really good defense. I think Brent Venables has a very good defensive scheme,” Nick Saban said. “But I also think Tennessee’s style of play requires a little bit of a different approach because you can’t play at your normal pace because they’re fast.”

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“You have to make quick decisions. Your players have to line up quickly. And then they’re going to try to slow you down, smack you, not snap the ball, see what you’re doing and use that to their advantage. So you have to be able to kill some things on defense to change your defense so that they don’t always know exactly what you’re doing.”

Brent Venables is known for his exotic blitzes, but Tennessee’s pace on offense could prevent Oklahoma from executing many of the blitzes it would like to run.

Saban added that Tennessee also makes it difficult to use substitutes, which leads to player fatigue and prevents coaches from utilizing their third-down packages.

“You have to be prepared not to be able to subpackage on third down because they’re quick on third down. I remember when we played up there a couple years ago, man. We did all that stuff on third down, substituting personnel. They never let us use a single substitute in the game,” Saban said. “We held out the whole first half. The only time we tried to use a substitute, we had too many people on the field. So now you have to play everything in nickel, that’s how you play against them on first and second down.”

There’s no doubt that Brent Venables is one of the best defensive coaches in college football, but there’s also no doubt that his defense will have its hands full on Saturday.

“They cause a lot of problems,” Saban said of Tennessee. “But I would assume Brent spent a lot of time before this game week preparing for this type of offense.”