Who is Ben Arbuckle? Breaking down the Oklahoma Sooners offensive coordinator candidate
The Oklahoma Sooners have fired offensive coordinator Seth Littrell after a dismal 2024 season. The search for a new play-caller on offense is firmly underway, and we know what Sooners’ head coach Brent Venables wants his next offense to look like. This article will be part of a series I will be doing breaking down […]
The Oklahoma Sooners have fired offensive coordinator Seth Littrell after a dismal 2024 season. The search for a new play-caller on offense is firmly underway, and we know what Sooners’ head coach Brent Venables wants his next offense to look like.
This article will be part of a series I will be doing breaking down the 15 most-linked coaches to the Sooners’ open OC position. If new names arise, I will adjust and add or subtract new names as time goes on. I’m aiming to get an article on every coach out daily.
Each article will be linked to each other, so as this goes on, you can find a different coach no matter which article you click on for ease of access to transition to other content.
For this piece, I’ll focus on Washington State offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle, whose offense has the Cougars at 7-1 (the only loss was to Ashton Jeanty and Boise State) and ranked for the first time this season.
Who is Ben Arbuckle?
How Ben Arbuckle even got to Pullman, Washington is a remarkable story in and of itself. Just six years ago, he was working with DCP Midstream, an oil and gas company in Houston, Texas. After finishing his playing career as a quarterback for West Texas A&M in 2017, Arbuckle transitioned into the workforce but simply hated it.
Just a few months into his job, Arbuckle was told about a volunteer position available with the Houston Baptist football team. At that time, Houston Baptist was led by head coach Vic Shealy, who had just hired an up-and-coming offensive mind in Zach Kittley (more on Kittley in a separate article).
Arbuckle and Kittley hit it off right away, and the deal was done. It wasn’t easy for Arbuckle, as this was an unpaid volunteer role, Arbuckle had to juggle this with his marriage. According to the Seattle Times, Arbuckle would deliver Uber Eats on the side before and after practice to make ends meet.
Yet, it was here Arbuckle discovered his passion for coaching. He wasn’t allowed to coach on the field for the Huskies, but he enjoyed working with the offensive line and special teams in practice while assisting coaches with film and scouting reports. Arbuckle even served as a pseudo-recruiting coordinator, helping coordinate lodging and social media reports for recruits.
Then, COVID struck. The strain it put on their finances and the worry that Houston Baptist would shut down forced Arbuckle into a decision to leave. Needing a paid job, he took a job as the offensive coordinator for Seminole High School, well across the state from Houston.
However, he wouldn’t be there long. Western Kentucky had hired Zach Kittley, who immediately called Arbuckle to serve as a quality control coach for the Hilltoppers. Arbuckle accepted the position without a second thought.
The Hilltoppers had tremendous success. Led by Bailey Zappe, Western Kentucky scored 44.2 points per game with a whopping 536.2 total yards per game and 433.7 yards passing per game. Zappe broke NCAA FBS records for both passing yards and passing touchdowns in a single season with 5,967 and 62, respectively.
This success saw Kittley earn a call from his alma mater, Texas Tech, to serve as their offensive coordinator. Western Kentucky head coach Tyson Helton quickly promoted Arbuckle to be his successor, citing things he had seen in practice.
"What I do with all our quality control guys is I try to put them in positions where I can evaluate them for future hires. During practice, I would let Ben call some plays — whether it was the [second- or third-string players] and evaluate him to see if I would want him as a quarterback coach, some other position coach or even as a possible coordinator. He was really talented. I thought Zach Kittley had done a good job of training him. When [Kittley] came here with what we do offensively, we molded two offenses — what we did with our offense and what Zach did with his. I felt like Ben understood it, knew what I was looking for and just was really, really talented.”
Arbuckle quickly continued the success, this time with a new quarterback he recruited named Austin Reed. With Reed under center, the Hilltoppers averaged 497.1 yards per game and finished 9-5 for the second year in a row. Despite their success through the air, Arbuckle’s offense at Western Kentucky was much more balanced than Kittley’s, rushing for nearly 50 more yards per game and had 600 more rushing yards than their 2021 iteration. The Hilltoppers broke 2,000 yards on the ground in 2022.
His success at Western Kentucky caught the eye of a few Power Five coaches despite being just 27 years old at the time. Before anyone else had the chance to catch on, Washington State head coach Jake Dickert called Arbuckle to serve as the Cougars’ offensive coordinator.
Dickert, a defensive coach, was impressed with the design of Arbuckle’s offense, citing its ingenuity and creativity in stressing defense with different formations and motions. In just four years, Arbuckle went from working for an oil and gas company crunching numbers to a Power Five offensive coordinator.
Arbuckle hit the ground running last season. With Cam Ward under center, the Cougars were fourth in the country in passing yards per game and scored 31.7 points per game. In seven of their games in 2023, the Cougars posted 400+ yards of offense.
This season, the Cougars are 16th in scoring at 38.1 points per game, 26th in passing yards per game, and 26th in EPA/Play. Quarterback John Mateer is 12th in passing yards and tied for 10th in passing touchdowns.
What is Ben Arbuckle's scheme?
Given his background, you'd expect Arbuckle's scheme to be pure Air Raid. While some principles do exist, it doesn't resemble a Mike Leach or Dana Holgorsen level of Air Raid in the slightest. By and large, it's a pretty similar offense to the one Lincoln Riley deployed for years leading the Sooners.
The goal of his offense is pretty simple: Use tempo and pace to be calculatingly aggressive. Take advantage of any space and leverage the defense gives you as a result. Arbuckle will call his offense to wear down defenses with quick game passes, and most recently the run game, and set an up-tempo pace to tire defenses out before taking a kill shot.
A former quarterback himself, Arbuckle can effectively translate his system to quarterbacks, which helps explain why it’s worked with three different signal-callers in just three years.
John Mateer is 18th in EPA/dropback this season, while also boasting a 17th-ranked success rate and 13th-ranked yards per pass. These aren’t all layups either though. While the offense does feature hitch routes and screens, they also have thrown in plenty of out routes, Go’s, crossers, posts, and corner routes. Mateer is 12th in the country in Average Depth of Target at 10.8 yards. This isn’t the Bo Nix-led Oregon team.
Mateer himself isn't much beyond an average college quarterback, with poor processing ability and pocket presence. Yet, Arbuckle has been able to scheme up a productive passing offense in spite of that, and it's worked for most of the season.
This year, Arbuckle has really expanded the run game for the Cougars. While their raw stats seem modest (59th in rushing yards per game), the team went from 92nd in EPA/Rush to 57th while increasing their yards per rush from 4.29 (127th) to 5.82 (32nd) in one season. Four different players have over 100 yards rushing, led by quarterback John Mateer.
He’s trotted out a pretty expansive run game for the Cougars this season. Six different concepts have over 10 attempts this season, with inside zone and counter being the most-repped runs. They excel at gap runs, however, averaging 5.2 yards per carry on Counter, 6.1 on Power, and a whopping 9.9 on Duo runs.
They aren't the greatest rushing team out there, but he is a creative run game designer and he picks his spots to rush well. He has to, as Washington State's offensive line is largely ineffective and he boats little talent at running back.
Washington State has been a decently-heavy RPO team, with 27.3% of their plays this season being RPOs. However, these typically end up being runs, with 99 of their 140 RPOs ending up as runs. Given the physical play style of quarterback John Mateer, that’s not super surprising.
Dickert was accurate in his assessment of Arbuckle’s offense. The Cougars have lined up in at least 9 different formations and alignments, while also trotting out reps in 11 different personnel groups. Their bread and butter is 11-personnel, with 55.7% of their plays coming in 11.
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It's time for the Oklahoma Sooners to fire offensive coordinator Seth Littrell. It's clearly not working and after another embarrassing outing by the offense, changes have to be made. Fortunately, I've been working on an offensive coordinator list for several weeks now. Let's look on the optimistic side here and build a future for Sooners […]
Surprisingly, their motion rate wasn’t as high as I thought it would be, with Wazzu coming in at 42.9%, just a hair above the national average (42.88%). Now this isn’t a bad thing, more motion doesn’t necessarily equal good.
Given that the offense is about being up-tempo and dictating space and leverage, motion might muddy up the picture for the quarterback and could give a different picture post-snap than he was ready for.
Speaking of pace, let’s dive into their numbers. The Cougars are 22nd in the country in seconds per play at 24. Yet, interestingly enough, just 2.3% of their plays have been snapped with 30-34 seconds left on the play clock. 38% of their plays have been snapped with under 10 seconds on the clock this season. So despite having an up-tempo pace, they can still play ball control well. All told, 80.8% of their snaps occur after the 20-second mark on the play clock.
Are there concerns on Ben Arbuckle's fit with the Sooners?
As I noted in my article last week, Arbuckle hasn’t been perfect. Against Fresno State, the offense struggled big time and needed a late-game pick-six to clinch the win. Their yards per play was a season-low 4.28. Saturday against San Diego State, the offense once again needed some fourth-quarter heroics to clinch a win. The Cougars were *down* to the Aztecs before a 15-point fourth quarter sealed the game. Washington State capitalized on an interception to score the go-ahead touchdown with five minutes left in the game.
While the results weren’t necessarily pretty, they still had a 72nd percentile EPA/play, 64th percentile success rate, 84th percentile EPA/dropback, 82nd percentile in Yards/dropback, and a 77th percentile explosive play rate against San Diego State.
The main concern would be about how that style of play fits in the SEC. There’s not been a successful Air Raid team in the SEC, though there have been plenty of productive passers. At Washington State, that offense wilted in 2023 and tended to disappear against tougher defenses, scoring just six points on Arizona, 17 on UCLA, and 21 against Washington.
Unfortunately, that offense might not be tested until the postseason. The best team they played all season was Boise State, who they scored 24 points on, but beyond that, the two best teams they’ve played are Texas Tech and Washington, who they scored 37 and 24 points on, respectively. The offense had its worst games of the season playing those three teams.
That’d be a tad concerning for me, though Arbuckle can’t necessarily control Mateer throwing an interception in all three of those games and getting sacked eight times by Boise State. Mateer’s below-average ability as a passer certainly limits what the offense can do against defenses with a pulse, but Arbuckle won't lack for talent with Oklahoma.
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It wasn't much, but the Oklahoma Sooners' offense provided some reasons to be encouraged in their 26-14 loss to Ole Miss today. While 14 points isn't lighting the world on fire, it's more points than the Sooners had scored in their last two games combined (yes, really). Oklahoma's offense had multiple successful drives throughout the […]
Some of their inconsistencies have stemmed from injury, some from talent, while the rest could be attributed to Arbuckle. Some fans are pretty disgruntled about his play-calling, but when have fans never wanted to fire someone after a bad game?
There aren’t many concerns about his fit with the Sooners. He’s a young coach who hasn’t even turned 30 yet and is high-energy with plenty of ties to Texas. His system is pretty quarterback-friendly, which should help whoever is under center for the Sooners next season. It's a scheme that should be familiar to the offensive staff as well, given that many of them are holdovers from Lincoln Riley. Receivers coach Emmett Jones, the only non-Riley coach on offense, coached in Zach Kittley's offense with the Red Raiders, so the transition should be fairly seamless.
Ben Arbuckle Summary
Overall, it’s not a surprise to see Arbuckle be such a hot commodity in coaching circles. Oklahoma won’t be the only school calling about him this offseason. He’s young with an incredibly productive offense that has dismantled its fair share of defenses. Over the years, he has tweaked his offenses to fit his players and has grown as a play-caller every year, diversifying his offense each season. He’s only been an OC for three seasons. Before being hired by the Sooners, Riley had already spent four seasons as an OC.
Pair Arbuckle with the talent level that the Sooners can reach and it’s not hard to see why fans shouldn’t be excited. There are concerns about translatability to the SEC, but if Brent Venables wants to get back to explosive and high-scoring offenses, Arbuckle fits that to a T.
