Transfer Talk: What Oklahoma is Getting in QB John Mateer

The Sooners landed the top QB in the transfer portal, but they also got a gritty ballplayer who's equal parts confident and humble and carries himself as a natural leader.

Former Washington State quarterback John Mateer / Craig Strobeck-Imagn Images

Oklahoma is starting over on offense in 2025, and the Sooners have some holes to plug on defense and special teams as well.

So Brent Venables and the OU staff landed another impactful haul out of the NCAA Transfer Portal for 2025 — 14 players so far, with the possibility of more still to come.

This series begins Sooners On SI’s inside look at what OU is getting out of the portal for next season. First up: quarterback John Mateer.

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New offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle’s top priority when he touched down in Norman was to secure a quarterback.

He didn’t have to search far and wide for the Sooners’ next QB, as he and Brent Venables enticed Arbuckle’s starter in 2024 to join him at Oklahoma. 

Arbuckle knew exactly what kind of QB he wanted running his offense at OU, because he had coached the ideal candidate for two years in Pullman. He saw up close the very qualities that made John Mateer one of college football’s breakout stars this past season: confidence, humility toughness and ability. Lots of ability.

“He has this natural kind of, I don’t want to say swagger — he has a natural kind of comfortability to him,” said Cougars On SI publisher Joe Londergan, who covered Mateer’s record-breaking 2024 season at WSU. “He’s clearly having a lot of fun when he’s out there.”

Mateer’s journey to Pullman is well-known by now: he was lightly recruited out of Little Elm, TX, despite an impressive junior and senior season. He verbally committed to play FCS football at Central Arkansas, but chose not to sign in the early signing period. He remained confident that FBS offers would come, so he decommitted from the Bears and, in the airport on his way to a visit to New Mexico State, he got a phone call from then-WSU coach Jake Dickert with a scholarship offer.

“Me and my mom were in the airport, about to board. I get a call,” he told WSU play-by-play voice and host of The Cougar Football Hour Chris King last November. “ ‘We’re gonna offer you.’ We start crying right there in the airport. Super cute, super cute moment. Because I knew — we were going to New Mexico State, but I feel bad for those coaches — I was not going to New Mexico State. The next weekend, official visit up here, and I knew even before I came up here, I was gonna be a Coug.”

Former Texas Tech wide receiver and Mike Leach assistant coach Eric Morris had recruited Mateer at Little Elm while he was head coach at Incarnate Word and had been hired by Dickert to coordinate the Cougar offense. Morris was Mateer’s position coach and primary recruiter, and knew at the time he had landed a special talent out of the DFW Metroplex.

Cam Ward was Morris’ starter for two seasons at Incarnate Word and had transferred to WSU in January 2022. As Morris left in 2023 to replace Seth Littrell as head coach at North Texas, Ward started the ’22 and ’23 seasons for the Cougs with Mateer as his understudy. When Ward transferred to Miami for the 2024 season, Mateer had an inside track to the starting job, but still had to beat out senior transfer Zevi Eckhaus.

“I think the way that his teammates kind of described the differences in his leadership versus Eckhaus’s was Eckhaus was a little more intense — ‘a little more rah-rah’ was the exact description, whereas Mateer was very calm, cool and collected,” Londergan said.

“It doesn't seem like he's the kind of guy that gets in your face if you're doing something wrong or if there’s a lot of stuff that isn't necessarily working. And obviously, he wants to share in that joy … with his teammates when it is working. So I think that leadership really resonated with a lot of those guys … So yeah, I think his teammates were pretty instantly comfortable with his leadership style.” 

Four years as a starting QB in Texas taught Mateer how to work, and when he got to WSU, that made an impression on those around him, even if he was backing up Ward.

“The staff would rave about the work that he put in, you know, his prior two years,” King told Sooners On SI. 

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MORE JOHN MATEER

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Sooners On SI Podcast: The John Mateer Episode

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“They raved about his work ethic. … They raved about him doing all the hard work to put himself in a position when his time came and, I mean, goodness, he took the ball and ran with it as a redshirt sophomore. That's the thing too. I mean, he's in the WSU record book all over the place.”

With the college football season finally concluded after Ohio State’s national championship victory over Notre Dame on Monday night, the 6-foot-1, 219-pound Mateer’s 2024 NCAA statistical rankings are official: No. 1 nationally in points-responsible-for per game (22.3), No. 2 in points-responsible-for (268), No. 4 in total offense per game (330.4), No. 7 in yards per pass (9.05), No. 8 in passer efficiency rating (164.1), No. 10 in passing touchdowns (29), No. 10 in yards per completion (14.01), No. 17 in passing yards per game (261.6), No. 18 in rushing touchdowns (15), No. 22 in passing yards (3,139), No. 27 in touchdowns scored (15), No. 37 in completion percentage (.646), No. 38 in points per game (7.8), No. 46 in completions per game (18.67), No. 58 in total points scored (94), No. 73 in rushing yards per game (68.8) and No. 77 in rushing yards (826).

“Because Mateer has that added dimension of being able to move and kind of improvise, it adds, like, a whole new dimension, really,” Londergan said. “I think they kind of built certain parts of that into their play-calling this season.”

Londergan said the Cougars had a bit of a rebuild up front and had inexperienced players getting reps on the offensive line — not ideal for a first-year starter at QB. But Mateer made it work.

“He had a lot of pressure,” Londergan said. “Kind of had to make things happen when the first option wasn't necessarily good. And they liked having someone who had their head on straight and didn't panic.” 

“A line that Jake Dickert used a lot is, John is a refuse-to-lose kind of guy,” King said. “He used that a lot when talking about John's time here.  … That was something that the head coach described a lot, and that was, I felt, accurate. I mean, I think guys appreciated too, that he was very much, you know, he would be out there in those tough situations, taking hits. I like I said, he never shied away from anything. So I think that definitely gains your teammates’ respect when you're out there and you are in the mix of it, too.” 

Maybe Mateer’s arduous trip through the recruiting wringer taught him patience. He had only FCS offers from Houston Baptist, Columbia, Central Arkansas and Incarnate Word. He also said he got offers from Stephen F. Austin and Fordham. Despite throwing for a school-record 2,268 yards as a junior and breaking that with 2,449 yards as a senior and surpassing 7,060 passing yards, 1,223 rushing yards and 89 total touchdowns in his high school career, he was just a 3-star prospect overall — the 124th-ranked QB prospect in the country, the 248th-best prospect in the Lone Star State, and the No. 1,766-ranked overall prospect nationally, according to 247 Sports.

Washington State Cougars quarterback John Mateer / James Snook-Imagn Images

Mateer offered King his perspective on some of the nuances about how recruiting works for Texas quarterback prospects.

“I think one thing about the recruiting and the rankings is, if you're good young, you're going to be ranked very high,” Mateer said. “Like, I played as a freshman on varsity in Texas, but I wasn't an elite talent. I could just, like, I could throw but I wasn't an elite talent like some of the other guys over my class. Now, over time I developed — I think I developed at a higher rate than the other guys did. Like, they were good young, but then they stayed like (static), but I feel like I developed at a higher rate, and that's why it bothered me, because I wasn't going up the rankings at the same level that I was developing. 

“And of course, you know, going into games, I’d play quarterbacks; I played Jackson Arnold in high school. He was at Denton Guyer — he's the quarterback at Oklahoma right now (last fall) — and I just wanted to outplay him in that game. Because I knew there was gonna be scouts at that game, and I don't really remember — I have a bunch of respect for him, so I'm not gonna say I outplayed him in that game, but I believed I was better than him.”

Arnold’s Guyer team jumped to a big lead early and won that 2021 meeting 45-31. Playing from behind all night, Mateer finished with bigger numbers, completing 21-of-36 passes for 231 yards with one touchdown and three interceptions, while Arnold hit 11-of-20 for 135 yards with one TD and no picks. Mateer rushed 21 times for 85 yards and two touchdowns, while Arnold ran 13 times for 87 yards and a TD.

Mateer was a senior, Arnold was a junior. Arnold was still three months away from committing to OU; Mateer had been a Central Arkansas commit for two months.

Now Arnold has cycled out of Oklahoma after just two years and will play in 2025 for Auburn. He and Mateer might be the starting quarterbacks on Sept. 20, when the Tigers visit the Sooners in Norman. Or it could be Arnold and Michael Hawkins, who was a sophomore at Allen, TX, in the same district, when Arnold was a junior and Mateer was a senior. Hawkins spent most of his freshman season at OU as Arnold's backup in '24, but will now get to compete with Mateer for the starting job in '25.

As a four-year starter at Little Elm, Mateer’s first scholarship offer had actually come from Houston Baptist, where he had been noticed in 2019 and 2020 by then-HBU head coach Zach Kittley and his young apprentice: Ben Arbuckle. As Mateer finished at Little Elm and eventually landed at Washington State, Arbuckle coached high school football for a year, then followed Kittley to Western Kentucky before rerouting to Pullman.

It was in eastern Washington where Mateer’s intangibles were finally paired with Arbuckle’s meticulous coaching, producing a prodigious pairing in their one marquee season together at WSU.

After the dissolution of the Pac-12, WSU started the year 8-1 but then lost its last three regular season games.

Mateer was planning to play in the Cougars’ Holiday Bowl trip, but a little over a week after Arbuckle left for Oklahoma, Mateer entered the transfer portal and was the consensus No. 1 overall transfer prospect.

“He did really, really well, and he had a heck of a season,” King said. “I mean, what he can do, his dual-threat ability makes him an incredibly fun player to watch.”

Londergan said Mateer was always quick to credit his receivers or his offensive line for any success he had throwing the football or running it. That, too, resonates with his teammates and projects strong leadership as this hotshot Texan seemed to fit seamlessly into the Pullman community.

San Jose State quarterback Emmett Brown (left), Washington State Cougars offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle (middle) and Cougars quarterback John Mateer (10). / James Snook-Imagn Images

“The biggest thing is just he really kind of had a humble nature to him. Well, I should say he has a humble nature to him,” Londergan said. “I think with, like, Pullman, people might not necessarily — who haven't been there — know it’s very like a Midwest or Southern vibe that's obviously on the West Coast. It's very agricultural, and he can kind of resonate with that kind of humble personality that he has.”

That translates to the selfless way he plays, and that correlates with his relationships off the field.

“There’s a moxie to him,” King said. “You can see that moxie on the field. It is evident. And he did not shy away from hits. Now, you hope that doesn't catch up with him at any point, but it didn't this last year. But there's definitely a toughness to John.

“And I would just say he was a heck of a fun player to watch, and in my time around him, getting to interview him a handful times and being around him, you know — he’s a easy guy to root for.”