Brent Venables makes one thing clear about John Mateer’s hand injury that the quarterback won’t admit
Brent Venables and Sooners quarterback John Mateer are still ready for Alabama.
The Oklahoma Sooners are not an offensive-dominant team in 2025, and that’s pretty clear. Their identity is defense, defense, defense. But you can easily see the offense has the potential to be great. At the beginning of the season, the pass game was what worked; the run game didn’t. Now, it’s kind of flipped. Some of that is because of quarterback John Mateer.
If you ask Mateer about his hand injury, which required surgery on his thumb, he will tell you it’s no big deal. Mateer is the ultimate leader of a program. Does he make some pretty dumb mistakes sometimes? Yes. But it’s clear that his hand has affected him; just watch the video of his handshake with a fan before their matchup against the Tennessee Volunteers. Mateer won’t tell you he’s affected by the hand, but head coach Brent Venables will tell it straight up.
“I don’t know the degree. I’ve seen it improve,” Venables said during the SEC Media Call. “You’d be naive in believing that, based on the surgery and the history behind those injuries, to say that he’s gonna be back at full speed as soon as he’s fully released. It’s going to be a process. We need to be really good around him, all three phases. When we do that, we’ll have a chance to play winning football every week.”
Mateer is not the same when throwing the football
At the beginning of the year, Mateer had some spectacular throws — throws you don’t see a lot of college quarterbacks make. You can point to the game against the Michigan Wolverines, when he found Isaiah Sategna after escaping the pocket, as one of the best throws this season for any quarterback.
Sure, you can point to the fact that now the Sooners and Mateer are playing better defenses. However, when we talk about how he throws the ball, you can see the difference in clean pockets alone. How does he throw the ball so much differently now in clean pockets than he did then in clean pockets?
That’s not a mental thing.
Mateer makes mistakes like every QB does. He’s still developing, and it’s important to remember that. But there is no other reason he just started doing this little jump thing in the pocket when he throws, that he didn’t do before the injury. It’s his throwing hand, and the thumb has everything to do with how hard and how well you can grip and throw the ball.
Mateer has been doing this little flat-footed jump throw in the pocket lately, and it’s very obvious that it’s because he is trying to get more velocity on his throws. And then the difference in his runs is another clue that his hand has obviously been different. He’s playing a bit more scared in the quarterback-designed runs, but last game, on the big third and 16 run he had for a first down, he looked himself again.
Venables is just saying what most can see, but Mateer won’t admit. Hopefully, against Kalen DeBoer and the Alabama Crimson Tide, Mateer plays some of his best football.
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