Oklahoma QB Jackson Arnold Enjoying His Freedom, but Says Nothing is Easy

Being a quarterback at OU, he said, means "everything is earned," but he's leaning on his coach and teammates for guidance.

NORMAN — Three months into his college football career, Jackson Arnold on Wednesday offered an early assessment of life so far as Oklahoma’s next great quarterback.

Nothing is easy, other than maybe the school part. He’s certainly enjoying his newfound freedom as a college freshman. And the practices at OU are way more intense than what he was used to in high school.

“I feel good so far,” Arnold said after the the Sooners’ fifth practice of the spring. “Just learning everything I can right now from all the other quarterbacks in the room.”

Arnold made high school football look easy, but college — even though he won’t play in a game for another six months — is anything but. The biggest thing he’s learned so far?

“How intense the practices are,” he said. “In high school, we never did too much of offense versus defense. I feel like here, that’s all we do. It’s straight competition 24/7. I like that a lot.”

Jackson Arnold :: STEVE SISNEY/FOR THE OKLAHOMAN-USA TODAY NETWORK

Life for any college freshman is liberating, literally — even one with the discipline of a major college quarterback. Arnold is no different.

“I like the freedom,” he said, “not having my parents around me all the time controlling what I do.”

Arnold insists that self-discipline was never a problem when he was at Guyer High School in Denton, TX. He always handled his business. But it definitely feels different now that he’s on his own.

“I was never irresponsible when I was in high school. So it’s not that much of a transition for me,” he said. “But just being able to do what I want, with making sure I get all my work done during the day, has been a priority for me.”

In any case, Arnold is incredibly glad he made the decision to graduate high school early and enroll at OU this semester, rather than graduate in May and show up in Norman in June.

“I never realized how much of a benefit it truly was until a month in,” he said. “I thought if I came this summer, I could learn this offense pretty quick and get used to it and learn how to essentially play this offense in the fall pretty quick. That’s wrong. I need it. I’m going to need this whole spring to get used to this offense and get used to learning Coach Lebby’s offense.”

Offensive coordinator Jeff Lebby is demanding of his quarterbacks, regardless of their age or experience level. Lebby has high expectations that Arnold commits himself to learning all the protections, all the blocking schemes, all the receiver routes — and how defenses tend to react to all of it.

So far, Lebby has been impressed.

"You don’t have one-on-one football meetings nonstop like we do right now with him," Lebby said, "so the fact that he’s come in and he’s picked everything up and he’s worked incredibly hard … he’s spent a ton of time in the building on his own. He understands what it means to be the guy here and understands what it is going to take for him to get to that point. He’s spent a lot of time and has done a good job in there, which has been good to see."

As per usual, Lebby gave Arnold a playbook to study after he signed. Arnold spent a month boning up, but then got to Norman and realized he didn’t even know what he didn’t know. Now that he’s on campus, having Lebby as an instant resource has been invaluable to his early evolution.

“It’s a lot different,” Arnold said, “ … Just going through it at my house, not a lot of things I understood. To be able to come up here and talk to the coaches and dealing with the whole quarterback room too and going through some stuff, it clears up a lot of pictures or me and helps me read out the plays.”

Arnold underscored what a huge help it has been to have Dillon Gabriel and the rest of the Sooner quarterbacks to bounce things off of.

“It helps a lot,” he said. “After sets of team or what not, I’ll go to the quarterbacks and ask, ‘What did I do good? What did I do wrong? What do I need to improve on?’ It’s super helpful having people there to have your back.

“Learning this offense isn’t easy at all, and having somebody like Dillon and the rest of the quarterbacks in the room – Davis (Beville) and General (Booty) – being able to ask them a question in meetings about something I don’t quite understand has been really helpful so far.”

Arnold’s bottom line is managing his day-to-day life so he can ultimately manage his own internal expectations. Football is his priority, but he has a lot on his plate away from the Switzer Center.

Nothing, he reiterated, is easy about playing football at Oklahoma.

“Classes haven’t been too hard,” he said, “but on the football field, absolutely not. Everything is earned. You have to work super hard out here.”