ARLINGTON, Texas — On a September Saturday in 2022, the Southwest Conference had itself a weekend. In Dallas, SMU had a record crowd on hand to greet the traitor Sonny Dykes, who had jumped ship to rival TCU, only to watch the Horned Frogs come away with the Iron Skillet in their 101st meeting.
Just 24 miles away, Texas A&M knocked off a top-10 Arkansas in their 79th two-step together, in a weird, tense game that typifies their matchups since their old rivalry resumed at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. And in Lubbock, another 336 or so miles from Arlington, Texas Tech upset No. 22 Texas in front of the Red Raiders’ first sellout crowd since 2018, and many of the 60,975 in attendance flooded the field in the aftermath.
Now, the SWC hasn’t existed since 1996, but the passion will never die, despite attempts to kill it. On one Saturday in Texas, there were three games with three packed stadiums amid an attendance crisis for administrators at many schools, a reminder that sometimes it’s more fun to play someone with a little extra hate on the line.
Since the SWC’s breakup, TCU has played in four conferences (WAC, Conference USA, Mountain West and now, the Big 12) while SMU was aligned in the WAC and CUSA before landing in the American. Still, despite their nomadic journeys in search of future relevance, they’ve managed to maintain a regional rivalry for more than a century.
“I think it makes sense for teams that are close to each other to play each other,” Dykes said two weeks ago when the drumbeat started for his return to Dallas. “You know, that’s why it makes so much sense for USC to be in the Big Ten … they’re right there next to each other.”
Dykes’ sarcasm comes at a time when realignment continues to pull at the strings of college football’s fabric, breaking up long-standing rivalries and making it harder for fans to get to, or even care about, games. The Iron Skillet — once so celebrated that legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice called the 1935 edition the “Game of the Century” — has no guarantee of continuing past 2024 when the current contract ends.
As leagues go to more conference games and athletic budgets are determined by home games, Power 5 teams like TCU don’t often make trips to Group of 5 schools, so TCU might opt to ditch playing in Dallas every other year, when it could schedule another home game. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State have already made it clear Bedlam will not continue when the Sooners leave for the SEC, just like the Texas A&M-Texas rivalry has been dormant since the Aggies headed Southeast.
Texas Tech’s upset this weekend came in what very well could be Texas’ last trip to Lubbock with the Longhorns’ impending SEC move, likely ending a series that has been played 72 times.
Dykes understood the appeal of his return, saying “I’d boo me too” in the week before the game. It was a boon for SMU, with the Mustangs selling more than 35,000 tickets at a place that has struggled to draw big crowds. And while the stadium never quite filled in part due to the searing heat, the middle of SMU’s campus which was packed with tailgaters along the Boulevard.
“The energy, the excitement, you just can’t replicate that,” said Rogge Dunn, an attorney and SMU fan. “We’re not in the Big 12. We’re not in the Southwest Conference. All our traditional rivals are gone. It’s hard to get up for UAB or East Carolina. The great thing about this rivalry is it’s so close.”
Down the Boulevard, at a tent selling red shirts with “TCU SUCKS” on them, Chipper Haynes, a 2003 SMU grad, lamented the possible demise of a game that’s circled on his calendar every year.
“It means everything to us,” Haynes said. “That’s probably what breaks my heart the most about the big realignment stuff is you lose these huge rivalries. We’ve made these shirts for the last 20 years. The idea that we might not play TCU coming up because of realignment and everything going on, it sucks. It takes part of the spirit of college football away.”
Dykes agreed, saying in his postgame news conference he knew the fans would be up for his return and give him their best shot.
“I thought that stuff off the field was college football,” Dykes said. “That’s why this game was well-attended. That’s why Kansas is sold out today. That’s why Texas A&M-Arkansas is sold out at JerryWorld, that’s why we’re sold out next week. Because it’s just so exciting. It’s great for the fans. Sometimes it’s hard to be the brunt of some of that. But you’ve got a job to do.”
He said he was happy to get this week behind him, but that he was able to focus on the game and not the emotion around it.
“I’m 52 years old. … If I can’t do that, I need to go work for Ricky Chicken over at Chicken Express,” he said, in a reference to fast-food chicken magnate Ricky Stuart II, a TCU trustee.
At Jerry Jones’ house in Arlington, as Dykes mentioned, the Aggies and Razorbacks met in a series that ended in 1991 when the Hogs left the SWC for the SEC, then returned as a neutral-site game in 2009. Both schools are eager to get the series back on campus starting in 2025 now that it has become a heated conference game with the potential to sell lots of tickets.
While the Aggies and the Hogs never had the hate for each other that they each had for the Longhorns before the end of the SWC, their SEC era has been inflamed by their proximity as Arkansas’ enrollment has grown. In 2021, 6,720 of Arkansas’ 24,265 undergraduate students were Texans.
Texas A&M grad Tommy Shiflett and his daughter Logan, one of those Texans who is a freshman at Arkansas, walked the concourse Saturday together with their split allegiances on their shirts.
“It’s a bigger rivalry now because she had 12 months of talking noise to me, and I need it back,” Shiflett said in reference to the Razorbacks ending the Aggies’ nine-game winning streak in the series last year. “I need to be able to run my mouth a little bit. That’s why there’s just the two of us here. The rest of the family isn’t here.”
Logan, for her part, couldn’t handle the Aggies having the lead. “I can’t do this right now,” she said, with a laugh.
Yet, even as a newcomer, Logan agreed that rivalries are fun. Arkansas fans even booed a dog — Texas A&M’s mascot, Reveille — when she was shown on Jerry Jones’ giant video screen. And still, all the Ags and Hogs in the place could come together as one when the highlights from Texas’ loss to Texas Tech got the big-screen treatment, leading to one of the biggest cheers of the night.
In places like Texas, where rivalries that go back more than 100 years are in danger of being lost — if they’re not already — there’s more at stake than just wins and losses. Houston and Rice met for the 44th time Saturday for the Bayou Bucket, another crosstown rivalry that is scheduled only through 2023 and might not continue with Houston moving to the Big 12.
“In the state of Texas, you want to be No. 1,” said Drew Hogan, a TCU fan at the SMU game. “It doesn’t matter what game it is, who it is, you want to win for bragging rights at dinner.”
John Jenkins, the flamboyant coach who was best known for beating SMU 95-21 while with Houston in 1989, the Mustangs’ first season back from the NCAA “death penalty,” grew up in the Panhandle of Texas, coached at every level in the state and was in attendance for the Aggies’ win over his alma mater, Arkansas.
“Playing my high school ball in Texas, coaching high school football in Texas right on up through the college ranks and pro football, it means everything to me, with the attached rivalries that you’ve had in this state,” Jenkins said. “To see this thing get splintered and fragmented just really hurts. It’s ridiculous. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t make a damn about rivalries or football strength. It’s all about media markets.”
As the Big Ten grabs USC and UCLA to get those elusive markets, followed by whatever comes next in the realignment derby, there will be more tradition lost.
“I realize that with some of the megaconferences now, they’re gonna have fewer nonconference games,” Dunn said. “But there’s still room for these games. They may have other agendas, but this is what the fans want.”
Even new die-hards who didn’t grow up with the sport, like Tony Simulik, a Canadian from Ottawa who was drawn to college football’s passion, are concerned about the future.
Simulik travels to SEC country each year to take in big games. He came to Arlington hoping to see the Aggies and Hogs play in the Cowboys’ stadium, saying “it was just an astonishing experience.”
“It’s like cultural history,” he said. “It’s iconic. The fans, the chants, the singing, the activity. That’s already worth the price of admission just to see that and feel that in that stadium. It’s the atmosphere. I’ve often thought at times the game is almost anticlimactic.”
Almost, but not quite, for the tens of thousands of fans who celebrated victories over longtime rivals and, in some cases, wondered if they’d be able to do so again.
Florida State freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was shot in the back of the head Sunday night, his father said, and remains in stable condition at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.
Earl Pritchard told WFTV in Orlando that Ethan Pritchard was shot while driving his aunt home from a family gathering in Havana, Florida, which is about 16 miles from Tallahassee, near the Georgia state line.
“He was actually in the car taking my sister around the corner to her daughter’s house to drop her off,” Earl Pritchard told WFTV. “They turned the corner, and as soon as they turned the corner, they heard gunshots.”
Earl Pritchard said doctors continue to monitor the swelling in Ethan’s head.
An investigation into the shooting by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office is ongoing.
Florida State coach Mike Norvell said Wednesday he has been able to briefly visit Ethan Pritchard in the hospital, and he has remained in contact with Earl Pritchard.
“It’s a lot, not going to say it’s not,” Norvell said. “I try to give the players a daily update. … I was able to go by yesterday for a short period of time with limited visitation, just getting a chance to be there for a handful of minutes. It was good to be with him.
“He’s still in stable condition. … We are absolutely praying for him every day and trying to be there for our players, too. Yes, it’s one thing on the field, but it’s also off the field, that’s one of their brothers and a guy they deeply care about. Just working through this part of the tragedy of what it is.”
Pritchard, who is from the Central Florida area, did not play in the Seminoles’ season-opening victory against Alabama.
Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer still believes he has a good football team, even after last week’s surprising 31-17 loss at Florida State.
The season-opening loss to the Seminoles, who went 2-10 last season, was the Crimson Tide’s fifth loss in their past 10 games under DeBoer, who was hired in January 2024 to replace Nick Saban.
“My message is that our team is, I think we have a good football team that can do some big things still this year,” DeBoer said during Wednesday’s SEC coaches teleconference. “We’ve got to prove it. We’ve got to go do it.”
DeBoer, 50, went 9-4 in his first season as Alabama’s coach, the first time the Tide lost more than three games since Saban’s first team went 7-6 in 2007.
Most alarming to some Alabama fans is that the Tide have lost four times as a double-digit favorite in DeBoer’s first 14 games. They were a 13½-point favorite over Florida State, which ended Alabama’s 23-game winning streak in season openers.
DeBoer said he is trying to stay the course heading into Saturday’s home game against Louisiana-Monroe (7:45 p.m. ET, SEC Network), despite widespread criticism surrounding his program.
DeBoer said Keenan, who had 40 tackles and 2½ sacks last season, was “doing really well” and it wasn’t a long-term injury.
Miller, the Tide’s top returning rusher with 668 yards with seven touchdowns in 2024, might be able to return for a Sept. 13 home game against Wisconsin, DeBoer said.
“Jam is doing really well,” DeBoer said. “Will not be available this week but coming along, again, as good as you could’ve expected. We knew there would be a possibility for next week and that’s certainly still the case.”
Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
NORMAN, Okla. — From a Denny’s in Rolla, Missouri, John Mateer settled one of the most consequential transfer decisions of the college football offseason last December. Four months after he won the starting job at Washington State, Mateer had closed an explosive 2024 regular season on Nov. 30, with 3,965 all-purpose yards and more touchdowns — 44 — than any other FBS quarterback. When he sat down with family to discuss his future two weeks later, over 24-hour breakfast a day after his sister’s college graduation, Mateer had the attention of every QB-needy program in the country.
The Cougars tried to keep him with an improved NIL package. Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski FaceTimed on behalf of newly hired North Carolina coach Bill Belichick, whose Tar Heels lodged a sizable bid. Miami stepped in with a substantial financial figure of its own, too.
“They were throwing some freaking money at me, man — oh my god,” Mateer told ESPN this spring. “But it wasn’t about that. The money was always going to come. The scheme and the fit had to be right.”
The interested parties waited patiently into mid-December. In reality, by the time his name officially landed in the NCAA transfer portal on Dec. 16, Mateer’s mind had been effectively made up since Dec. 2. Once Oklahoma hired Ben Arbuckle, the 29-year-old playcaller behind his breakout season, Mateer’s next move became a “no-brainer.”
“It ended up being a really easy decision after Ben Arbuckle came here,” said Mateer, who sources tell ESPN will earn between $2.4-3 million in his first season with the Sooners in 2025.
By following Arbuckle, Mateer, a preseason Heisman hopeful, placed his faith in continuity and a partnership that produced 36.6 points per game a year ago.
This fall, Oklahoma coach Brent Venables is betting even bigger on the connection between his imported QB/OC duo in a potentially make-or-break 2025 campaign. The first major test comes Saturday when the Sooners host No. 15 Michigan (7:30 PM EST, ABC).
How quickly can Mateer and Arbuckle restore an offense that ranked 97th in scoring and 113th in total offense a year ago? It’s a central question of Oklahoma’s 2025 season, which began with a 35-3 Week 1 win over Illinois State that lifted the Sooners to No. 18 in the latest AP poll.
Last season, hamstrung by injuries and inconsistent quarterback play between former five-star recruit Jackson Arnold and freshman Michael Hawkins Jr., the Sooners fired playcaller Seth Littrell seven games into the season and floundered to a 6-7 finish in their SEC debut. Oklahoma’s 24.0 points per game marked its lowest scoring figure since 1998, the year before Bob Stoops took over.
On the hook for the program’s only pair of losing seasons in the 21st century, Venables vowed to fix that offense last November. Less than a month later, he landed Mateer and Arbuckle — the tandem engines to the nation’s sixth-ranked scoring offense in 2024 — and placed them at the core of the critical rebuild.
Mateer is now in his third season operating Arbuckle’s aggressive, up-tempo system, and the duo has developed a steadfast, mutual trust. Born in Texas only nine years and 335 miles apart, they’re jelled personally, too, bonded by a tight relationship that’s brought them both closer to home in 2025 and a shared kinetic energy that can shift the vibe of an entire offense.
When Mateer finalized his decision last December from the Denny’s in mid-Missouri, his first text message went to Arbuckle. Forty-eight hours later, Mateer flew to Oklahoma and committed, sealing the high-stakes move that transported one of the nation’s most dynamic offenses to Norman.
“When John made the decision that he wanted to come to Oklahoma … it was special,” said Arbuckle. “Because it said, ‘OK, we get to keep this thing rolling.'”
BEFORE HE DIVES into the details of a Friday night game-prep meeting, Arbuckle will usually open with a little something extra for his players.
A history lesson, an anecdote related to the next day’s opponent, clips from 2000s comedy classics like “Old School” and “Superbad” — anything that might ease the pregame tension or get his player’s minds engaged. When Wazzu hosted Texas Tech this past fall, Arbuckle delivered a speech on Doc Holliday, the 19th-century gunslinger who, apocryphally, never lost a shootout.
A group reenactment of Matthew McConaughey’s chest-thumping bit from “The Wolf of Wall Street” once proved especially popular.
“They both care about football and they take the serious things seriously,” Clay McGuire, WSU’s offensive line coach in 2023, said of Mateer and Arbuckle. “But the minute you’re around them, you know, your energy level and your comfort level just raises automatically. And it’s a gift.”
That presence is part of the secret sauce that transformed WSU’s offense into appointment television in 2024, and part of what Oklahoma paid for when it onboarded the QB/OC duo.
In Jan. 2023, the Cougars needed it, too. Arbuckle had just finished his first season as a Division I playcaller.
Four years removed from his role as quality control staffer at Houston Baptist, where Arbuckle famously moonlighted as an Uber Eats driver to make ends meet, Western Kentucky coach Tyson Helton promoted him as one of three co-offensive coordinators in 2022. The arrangement ultimately lasted all of one game. “Everyone knew Ben was the guy,” Helton said.
While Arbuckle’s offense averaged nearly 500 yards per game and turned Austin Reed into the nation’s leading passer, WSU had dropped five of its final eight games that fall.
Players flooded into the portal in December. The Cougars got blown out by Fresno State in the LA Bowl later in the month. And, for the third time in as many years, the Cougars were hunting for a new offensive coordinator. Djouvensky Schlenbaker, a former Wazzu running back who is now at UT Rio Grande Valley, recalled a sour mood hovering over the program when Arbuckle arrived in early 2023.
“The year before was just rough,” he said. “He came in and flipped a switch. Arbuckle made the game fun again.”
In his first player’s meeting at WSU, Arbuckle presented his plan. The Cougars were going to throw the ball. They were going to take chances. And they were going to be explosive.
Arbuckle also introduced a favored acronym to ensure they understood his precise philosophy. Oklahoma players are accustomed to the term now, too. Publicly, “ATFA” stands for accountable, tough, fast, aggressive. Behind closed doors, it carries a different meaning.
“Attack their f—-ing a–,” Cougars tight end Cooper Mathers explained. “That was our thing. If we’re up by a lot or down by a lot, Arbuckle is calling the game the same way. If it doesn’t work? So what? F— it.”
The Cougars posted 45.7 points per game in four wins to open the 2023 season, then lost all but one of their eight remaining contests. But with future No. 1 NFL draft pick Cam Ward under center, WSU finished the season 35th in total yards and 38th in scoring, up 59 and 42 spots, respectively, from the year before.
In the backdrop, Mateer sat behind Ward and absorbed the system as a redshirt freshman.
MATEER APPEARED IN 12 games off the bench in 2023. Decoy packages, two-quarterback sets, short-yardage runs — Arbuckle scripted something to get him on the field every week.
When Ward left for Miami after the 2023 season, the Cougars brought in Zevi Eckhaus, a veteran FCS transfer to compete for the starting job. But, among the staff, there was little doubt.
“Our confidence was high because John was such a pro backup,” Arbuckle said. “He very easily could have been the starter the year before. I knew we had a chance to be really special in 2024.”
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John Mateer says he’s not impressed by record-setting OU debut
Despite throwing for 392 yards vs. Marshall, the most in program history for an Oklahoma QB playing his first game, Mateer tells SEC This Morning he can play better.
The son of collegiate swimmers, Mateer was a four-year starter at Little Elm High School, an underdog program within Texas’ top classification situated 35 miles north of Dallas.
Despite promising dual-threat ability and a pair of school passing records, Mateer went almost entirely overlooked in the 2022 recruiting class. He finished his senior season prepared to sign with FCS Central Arkansas. But when Eric Morris, Arbuckle’s predecessor in Pullman, left Incarnate Word for WSU in Dec. 2021, he used his first flight in the job to fly back to Texas and flipped Mateer to the Cougars.
“Every coach I talked to told me that kid’s the best player in this area,” said Morris, now in his third year as coach at North Texas. “He’s smart, he’s fun to be around. He’s not an a–hole. Players are drawn to him. Some people need to start paying attention to that stuff in recruiting.”
Schlenbaker, a fellow 2022 signee, quickly clocked a quiet confidence in his quarterback early on at WSU.
“He has calmness in him,” Schlenbaker said of Mateer. “Wherever he goes, there’s no anxiety at all. Football comes easy for him. It’s just another day for him.”
That personality clicked with the way Arbuckle and John Kuceyeski, an offensive analyst who followed Arbuckle to WSU from Western Kentucky, approached the game. Loose, easygoing and fiercely competitive, the trio meshed immediately.
Maeteer hung in their offices, peppering the coaches with questions. He watched football from their living rooms and got close to Arbuckle’s family, too. Fellow Texans, Mateer and Arbuckle spent offseason Saturdays cutting into brisket at Miss Huddy’s Barbecue, the Central Texas-style food cart in Pullman that gave Mateer one of his first NIL deals. On Sundays, Mateer and Kuceyeski met up for church.
“They put their faith in me, and those relationships are deep,” Mateer said. “Those guys taught me how to be a quarterback. But they also showed me how to be a man and a teammate.”
After Mateer beat Eckhaus for the starting job, he and Arbuckle compiled a catalog of memorable performances this past fall: The night Mateer torched Texas Tech for 197 rushing yards. WSU’s second win over Washington in more than a decade. The close call at San Diego State.
Yet none resonated among the Cougars better than Mateer’s fourth career start on Sept. 20, when the duo produced 627 yards of offense in a 54-52, double-overtime win over San José State.
Mateer was superb, accounting for five touchdowns and 501 of those yards. He helped WSU overcome a 14-point, fourth-quarter deficit, then threatened to undercut the comeback with an ill-fated, end zone interception on the Cougars’ first series of overtime.
The mistake could have been a backbreaker. Undeterred, Arbuckle went back to his quarterback on the next possession. Minutes later, Mateer ran in the winning 2-point conversion.
“You felt the confidence with him and Ben on the sideline that night,” Mathers said. “Even when things weren’t going our way. They made us feel like we always had a chance.”
THE BRAND OF indefatigable confidence between Mateer and Arbuckle is one of the pillars Oklahoma is counting on in 2025. Another, slightly more tangible pillar: the offense itself and the scheme the Sooners have spent the offseason “importing” from Washington State.
Oklahoma is now the latest on the short, but growing list of programs to hand its offense over to a proven QB/OC from elsewhere in college football’s transfer portal era. To date, the Sooners’ Pullman-sourced revamp is likely the most ambitious experiment of its kind.
However, if there’s an FBS coordinator uniquely positioned to know what it takes to pull it off successfully, it’s Arbuckle. He got his start at Houston Baptist in 2018 with then-offensive coordinator Zach Kittley. In Dec. 2020, Kittley took Arbuckle with him to Western Kentucky and HBU quarterback Bailey Zappe joined them via the portal soon after.
A year later, the Hilltoppers had the nation’s No. 1 passing offense and Zappe owned the single-season Division I record for yards (5,967) and touchdowns (62). The parallels between the two processes, with Mateer and Kuceyski with him at Oklahoma, are not lost on Arbuckle.
“This situation, honestly, kind of mirrored that one [at Western Kentucky] a lot,” he said. “When you have a quarterback who knows the system, it just speeds everything else up.”
In that sense, Mateer is not only the Sooners’ new QB1. He becomes one of the most essential cogs in the structural implementation of Oklahoma’s offense in 2025.
Oklahoma has retooled elsewhere across its offense. To reinforce the previous season’s trouble spots, the Sooners used the portal to add four wide receivers and a trio of experienced offensive linemen, headlined by Jake Maikkula (Stanford) and Derek Simmons (Western Carolina). Oklahoma hit the portal again in April to secure Cal‘s Jaydn Ott, one of the nation’s top returning running backs.
Even so, questions remain over how the Sooners can cope offensively this fall up against the nation’s third-toughest schedule per ESPN’s College Football Power Index.
But just as it was at WSU last fall, Mateer, Arbuckle and Kuceyski are at the helm. Perhaps influenced by his experience with Zappe at WKU, Arbuckle has consistently referred to his quarterback as an extra coach as they’ve slowly introduced the offense since January.
Players like offensive lineman Troy Everett, Mateer’s locker neighbor, second that notion.
“Those two are on the same page,” he said. “It’s like having Arbuckle on the field.”
Mateer and Arbuckle delivered a promising start in Week 1. With 392 passing yards, Mateer passed Baker Mayfield for the most by an Oklahoma quarterback in a Sooners debut.
Days before the opener with Illinois State, Mateer’s mind floated back to March 6. If the Sooners’ new quarterback hadn’t yet fully grasped the lingering impact of the program’s offensive despair in 2024, it was apparent by the end of the first initial spring camp practice.
One of Mateer’s first throws in an Oklahoma uniform was an over-the-shoulder touchdown connection to Arkansas-Pine Bluff transfer wide receiver JaVonnie Gibson. The moment qualified as one of the earliest on-field successes for Arbuckle’s offense in Norman. Mateer reacted by sprinting the length of the field to meet Gibson in the end zone.
Only after he got there did Mateer realize he was celebrating almost entirely alone.
“The culture of the offense wasn’t where it needed to be,” Mateer told ESPN at the time. “Nobody was used to scoring touchdowns and celebrating like that. I was like, ‘Dude, that’s what we’re here for.'”
Six months later, Mateer and his Sooners teammates celebrated plenty against Illinois State. If the QB/OC duo had two jobs when it got to Oklahoma — to restore the confidence of Oklahoma’s offense and to rejuvenate the unit itself — it is at least halfway there.