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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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.

Morris and Ward went 8-5 when they jumped together from Incarnate Word to WSU in 2022. A year ago, Vanderbilt pulled Diego Pavia and Tim Beck away from New Mexico State and won seven games for the first time since 2013. Oklahoma State (TCU‘s Hauss Hejny/Doug Meachem) and Utah (New Mexico’s Devon Dampier/Jason Beck) are giving it a shot this fall, too.

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.