Excuse fans of the Oklahoma Sooners if they’re feeling a bit of deja vu this week in the lead-up to a big-time nonconference game in Week 2 of the college football season.
After all, Sooner fans have already been in an eerily similar position to the one they’re in right now.
What’s going on in the 2025 season for Oklahoma is strangely reminiscent of what happened ten years ago in Norman. Following a disappointing 2014 season that saw his Sooners go 8-5 and struggle offensively, defensive-minded head coach Bob Stoops made the difficult decision to fire co-offensive coordinators Josh Heupel and Jay Norvell after the season. Stoops plucked East Carolina’s offensive coordinator, Lincoln Riley, from a nationwide search and gave him the keys to the offense. While Riley wasn’t the only reason or even the biggest reason for the turnaround, the Sooners improved in a big way on offense in 2015, leading to a Big 12 Championship and a berth in the College Football Playoff after an 11-1 regular season.
A decade later, Oklahoma limped to a 6-7 season in 2024, struggling mightily offensively. Defensive-minded head coach Brent Venables fired offensive play-caller Seth Littrell midseason and demoted co-OC Joe Jon Finley after the season. Venables chose Washington State’s offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle from a national search, and Arbuckle now runs the show for the Sooners on offense. While it’s still far too early to say what Oklahoma will be on offense this year, Sooner Nation hopes for a 2015-style bounce back.
But the similarities don’t stop there. Both Riley and Arbuckle come from the Air Raid family and both hail from West Texas. Riley is from Muleshoe, situated between Amarillo and Lubbock, near the eastern border of New Mexico. Arbuckle comes from Canadian, which is northeast of Amarillo in the Texas panhandle, not too far from the western border of Oklahoma.
Both played the quarterback position, and both have gained a reputation as quarterback whisperers in their coaching careers. Both coaches were very young when they began calling plays (Riley landed the ECU OC gig in 2010, while Arbuckle was Western Kentucky’s play-caller in 2022) and both were very young when they arrived at OU a decade apart from each other.
Riley and Arbuckle both have mentors in the Air Raid offense, as Riley worked for Mike Leach at Texas Tech, while Arbuckle learned under Zach Kittley at both Houston Baptist and WKU. Kittley is now the head coach at Florida Atlantic.
Because of their Air Raid roots, Arbuckle will need to learn the same lessons that Riley did when he began his run as the OC at Oklahoma. It took Riley about half a season to learn that the Sooners had to balance the run with the pass to truly be effective on offense. It’s a lesson Riley occasionally forgot in his later seasons with the Sooners. Arbuckle, meanwhile, doesn’t have the benefit of half a season to avoid learning that lesson the hard way, and he needs to find his balance as a play-caller quickly in the lion’s den of the Michigan defense and the SEC.
As much as Oklahoma fans may still have venom for Riley and the way he left Norman for Southern California, it’s hard not to see some of OU’s former head coach in its current offensive coordinator. They speak the same, attack opposing defenses in a similar way, and run very similar offensive schemes. Oklahoma hopes Arbuckle has the kind of offensive success that Riley did as an offensive coordinator.
Venables has gone back to the same well that his former boss, Stoops, did a decade earlier to fix his offense, and OU’s head coach needs similar results.
However, Sooner fans also know that having an offensive play-caller in place is only half the battle. After all, in Riley’s career, he has typically only been as good as the quarterback he’s had under center.
That’s where Oklahoma’s collision course with Michigan this week comes into play, and more similarities come into the picture.
When Riley took over the offense in 2015, the Sooners were also breaking in a new starting quarterback. Winning a QB derby for the right to be the starter was none other than Baker Mayfield. He was an under-recruited, undersized player from the Austin, Texas area. He walked on at Texas Tech but left after one season to walk on at Oklahoma. The spunky, confident quarterback would be playing in a familiar offense in Riley’s system, similar to the one he had just learned at Texas Tech under head coach Kliff Kingsbury.
Mayfield’s leadership, never-say-die attitude, and bravado paid off in Norman, as he finished fourth in Heisman voting in 2015, third in 2016, and first in 2017. He led the Sooners to three straight Big 12 titles and two CFP appearances. Even more so than Riley, it was Mayfield who was the catalyst for getting the OU offense back on track after a couple of down years.
Directly comparing OU’s current starting QB to Baker Mayfield isn’t fair to either player. John Mateer can’t be expected to live up to those lofty standards, at least not right away. However, the two share a lot of similarities.
Mateer was also an under-recruited, undersized player from the Dallas, Texas. The only power conference school (at the time) to offer him a scholarship was Washington State, so he decommitted from Central Arkansas to play for the Cougars. After spending two seasons in Pullman as a backup, Mateer started for the first time in 2024, and he had a breakout year.
Now, Mateer transfers to OU and will be playing in the same system he’s learned for the past two seasons, as he follows Arbuckle to Norman. However, he’s new to the Sooners this year. He’s got a confidence and a fire that can’t help but remind onlookers of Mayfield’s style, and he even looks like a young, pre-facial hair Mayfield.
As much as the Sooners need Arbuckle to succeed, Arbuckle needs a quarterback to be the triggerman in his system, just like Riley needed Mayfield in those early years with the Sooners. That’s why it was so crucial that OU landed Mateer as a transfer this December. Mateer, even more so than Arbuckle himself, is the most important piece of the puzzle to rebuilding Oklahoma’s offense.
So, how does OU-Michigan fit into all of this? Well, the 2015 Sooners were also gearing up for a big nonconference tilt in Week 2 of their season, this one coming on the road against Tennessee. After a lackluster Week 1 win over Akron, Oklahoma fans weren’t sure what they had with the Mayfield-Riley pairing.
You know what happened that night in Knoxville. Much more will be written about that contest when the Sooners make the return trip to East Tennessee to play the Vols later this year. The 2015 game was Mayfield’s introduction to the major college football public, as he led a gutsy 14-point fourth-quarter comeback that resulted in a 31-24 double-overtime win. The swashbuckling signal-caller rescued an OU offense that was stuck in the mud all night, doing so just in time to pull off the stunning comeback. It’s no stretch to say that it was that game that launched the Mayfield-Riley era in Norman.
Now, the Sooners are trying to pull that off again. With the Michigan Wolverines storming into Oklahoma on Saturday night, the Sooners are trying to improve from a lackluster win in Week 1 over Illinois State. This game will be Mateer’s introduction to big-boy college football, as he gets to display his gunslinger mentality with the eyes of the nation on him in this matchup. While the Mateer-Arbuckle pairing sure looks a lot better than what was in place last year, Sooner Nation still isn’t sure how good that duo, and the overall OU offense, can be.
If the Sooners beat Michigan at home, it could help launch them into a successful season in 2025 and maybe even beyond. After all, what Mayfield and Riley did that night against Tennessee in 2015, and the rest of that season, was felt throughout the Switzer Center for many years.
You see, Mayfield replaced Trevor Knight as Oklahoma’s starting signal-caller, and he was an immediate upgrade, as was Riley (at that time) over Heupel. It had been a couple of years since the Sooners had seen a true, consistent difference-maker at the most pivotal position on the roster, and Mayfield provided that. It was a stark difference from the Knight-Blake Bell-Cody Thomas seasons under center in 2013 and 2014 with Heupel at the helm of the offense as the OC.
With Mayfield providing proof of concept in the Riley Air Raid at OU, it led Texas A&M transfer Kyler Murray to pick the Sooners as his new home after the 2015 season. Murray waited his turn behind Mayfield and then won the Heisman himself in 2018. With Mayfield and Murray showing all kinds of success in four years with Riley calling the shots, the Sooners landed Alabama transfer Jalen Hurts after the 2018 season. All he did was finish second in Heisman voting in 2019 and lead another conference title run, the fifth of sixth in a row for OU from 2015 to 2020. Oklahoma made the CFP four times in five years from 2015 to 2019.
What Mayfield helped engineer in 2015 had a domino effect. Riley was able to land five-star recruits in Spencer Rattler and Caleb Williams because of his QB prowess. Both had their moments with OU, but ultimately, Riley wasn’t as effective overall in his last couple of seasons in Norman. Riley left after 2021, and Dillon Gabriel took over at quarterback in the first two years of the Venables era, with Jeff Lebby as the OC.
Gabriel was solid, especially in 2023, but he wasn’t the same level of player at OU that Mayfield, Murray, and Hurts were. After all, those are incredibly high standards to live up to. It’s no knock on his abilities, but the Sooners also failed to win a Big 12 title or go to the CFP in two years with Gabriel under center.
OU thought they had things rolling in a big way when former five-star prospect Jackson Arnold stepped into the spotlight last year, but that turned into a disaster rather quickly. With Gabriel at Oregon and Lebby at Mississippi State, the Sooners posted the worst offensive numbers for the program since 1998. All of the momentum Mayfield helped build nine years earlier in the QB lineage had run out.
With Arnold now at Auburn and Littrell an offensive analyst under Heupel at Tennessee, the Mateer-Arbuckle duo is now in place, trying to replicate the Mayfield-Riley successes of a decade ago. If Mateer can once again show proof of concept in the Arbuckle Air Raid at OU, it could lead to big seasons down the road for Michael Hawkins Jr., Bowe Bentley, and other QBs in the years to come in Norman.
Again, maybe it’s not fair to compare Mateer to Mayfield and Arbuckle to Riley. However, that’s the kind of offensive output the Sooners were hoping for when they brought both to OU. While Week 2 against Michigan isn’t the end-all, be-all for the 2025 season, a win on Saturday would be a good first step to building back the kind of quarterback and offensive lineage that has led the Sooners to their best seasons in recent memory. Additionally, with a defense that far exceeds the Riley-era units, Oklahoma can count on that side of the ball to be much more reliable than it was before Venables arrived.
With Venables calling the shots and the Oklahoma defense looking primed for another solid year, maybe the Mateer-Arbuckle duo doesn’t have to be as prolific as the Mayfield-Riley duo was.
Then again, why sell yourself short?
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