Will Sooners, Brent Venables fix what ails them? After Saturday night, the bigger question is, can they?

What we saw on the field vs. Houston was concerning, but so was what came after.

NORMAN — Brent Venables was less than a minute into his press conference Saturday evening when his opening list of positives led to an unexpected place.

"Luke Elzinga was fantastic," Venables said, then paused.

The OU coached smiled a bit, cocked his head and looked down.

"Coming in here to a press conference and braggin' on our punter," he said.

He tapped his fingers on the lectern, amusement seeming to mix with, what, frustration? Consternation? Alarm?

"But he deserves it," Venables continued. "He had eight punts; I think two were inside the 5 and three were inside the 10, and that was a big part of the game in a field-position game."

What I am about to say is in no way a knock on Elzinga. The Sooner punter is rock solid. Was last season. Has been this season. Should be on the Ray Guy Award watch list, quite frankly.

But the fact that the punter was so high on the list of positives after Saturday's Sooner escape tells you just about everything you need to know about the state of OU football.

Things are not good.

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And Venables seems to know it. Even though he didn't try to sugarcoat anything after a shockingly tight squeeze against a Houston team that got trucked by UNLV — Venables bluntly said during the on-field TV interview, "We deserved to lose" — the way he looked and sounded in that postgame press conference hinted at something even more serious.

His tone and tenor seemed to indicate that while he knows this team has problems, he's not sure they can be solved. At least not completely this season.

No coach would ever admit that, of course.

And Venables sure as shootin' wouldn't. He took over a program with one of the worst defenses in college football, and in two years, he built a defense that Sooners everywhere should be proud of.

Thankful for, too, because without that defense, OU loses to Houston on Saturday. The defense wasn't perfect, but it was way, way, way better than the offense.

The offensive line has been unable to block much of anyone.

The quarterback and his skill players have been largely meh.

And the offensive coordinator?

Seth Littrell has been underwhelming so far. I gave him the benefit of the doubt against Temple; the Owls are so bad that the Sooners didn't need to pull out many stops offensively. Only one throw of more than 20 yards? Few chunk plays? No home runs? I was willing to give Littrell a pass for going vanilla against Temple.

But what we saw against Houston was way more concerning.

There's been lots of scuttlebutt about how bad OU has been on third down. It converted only 1 of 12 against Temple and improved to a still woeful 4 of 14 against Houston.

But here's the thing, the Sooners' average third-down yardage against the Cougars was 8.7 yards.

That means the Sooners were largely dreadful on early downs. I went back and looked at all the first- and second-down plays against Houston, and OU only had plays of 5 yards or more on 15 of 46.

That ain't good.

"It always starts with me," Littrell said. "I'm never going to throw our guys under the bus, because, I'm the one week in week out, it's my job to put them in the right situations to be successful. 

"I'll take that."

I appreciate that Littrell is taking ownership of the offensive woes, but that isn't nearly as important as fixing them.

"It's a little bit of everything," Venables said when asked what ails the offense. "Gotta go back and re-evaluate a lot of things."

He paused a long moment.

"There was some opportunity there in the game to allow us to get into a rhythm. We missed some of those opportunities, so we'll have to go back and look at that."

He tapped his thumbs on the lectern this time.

"We gotta get a heck of a lot better quickly."

Of that, there is no doubt.

Tulane comes to town Saturday afternoon, and this past weekend, the Green Wave pushed a Kansas State team picked to vie for the Big 12 title and a spot in the College Football Playoff to the brink. An interception in the end zone as time expired finally secured victory for the Wildcats.

Tulane could beat OU.

Think of it this way: if OU and K-State were playing Saturday, wouldn't most folks take the Wildcats with the way the Sooners are playing right now?

Since Tulane went stride for stride with K-State, a Green Wave win at OU doesn't seem farfetched.

And if not Tulane, Tennessee is coming to town the following week. The Vols' defense hasn't been great in the Josh Heupel Era, but they have a defensive end named James Pearce Jr. ESPN recently ranked him the best player in all of college football regardless of position.

Think he might give that OU offensive line some trouble?

Then a few weeks after that, the Texas game looms. We knew the Longhorns were going to be good this season, but after they went to Michigan and bludgeoned the defending national champ, they appear to have entered a take-no-prisoners mode.

I'm not saying the Sooners will definitely lose to Tennessee or Texas. I'm not even suggesting they can't figure out some things. But this is a critical juncture for a program about to launch into the SEC.

"We made it awfully hard on ourselves too often," Venables said Saturday night.

Will OU fix what ails it?

The bigger and more ominous question is: can it?