John Mateer obviously isn’t afraid to tell it how it is after playing his first game with the Oklahoma Sooners
John Mateer kept it real after the Oklahoma Sooners beat Illinois State.
Being a quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners means just a little bit more than it does for some of the other blue-blood programs in the country. There is much more pressure that comes with that than with some of the other schools. John Mateer, the new QB at OU, will feel that, if he hasn’t already.
When the Sooners got Mateer in the transfer portal, that’s what immediately turned their program around before they ever even made any other moves, let alone played a game in 2025. That’s the type of pressure that comes with the job. But John Mateer doesn’t seem to care about any of that. He just wants to play football, and he wants to win.
Sooners quarterback John Mateer keeps it real after win over Illinois State
On Saturday, the Oklahoma Sooners kicked off their 2025 season with a win over an FCS opponent. It wasn’t the 60-point wins we are used to seeing from the Sooners when they play FCS teams, but it was a good showing of what this team is capable of. And, as head coach Brent Venables said after the game, they kept things pretty vanilla.
But the talk of the town after the win is that everyone finally got to see Mateer in a Sooners uniform, and man, was he good. He showed what all of the media and fans have been saying all offseason.
“It’s freakin’ football,” Mateer said after the win when asked if he was relieved to play his first game with Oklahoma. “I didn’t come here for the media or so I could get the hype. I came here to play football at a high level, and to do that, that was awesome, not because of the reactions coming out of anyone.”
That response in itself shows that he is big enough for the moment. That shows that if it came down to a big-time moment in a game, where he had to go win it, that he has what it takes intangibly. There are some questions about whether the Sooners had a single quarterback on their roster last year with that mindset. Maybe they did, but we weren’t ever able to see it.
Mateer is not going to sugarcoat it and just tell fans what they want to hear about everything, feeling surreal about playing in such a historical uniform at a historical stadium, like a lot of QBs would do. He doesn’t really care, but in a respectful way. He wants to win high-level football games. It was one game against an FCS opponent, but his play on the field did some of the talking, too.
He went 30/37 through the air, with 398 passing yards, which broke the record held by now Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB Baker Mayfield for most passing yards in an OU debut. Mateer also added four total touchdowns, three passing and one rushing. It’s safe to say he’s the real deal, and his comments afterwards only showed that he’s going to be able to handle everything thrown at him when it comes to the high-pressure job that is being a QB at OU.
