Oklahoma Sooners hire intriguing young G5 coach Ben Arbuckle for offensive coordinator position
The Oklahoma Sooners have finally filled their vacant offensive coordinator position. Oklahoma will name Washington State offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle as their next playcaller. He is fresh off of leading the Cougars to an 8-4 season. The Sooners fired Seth Littrell in October after a truly disastrous offense. Oklahoma's worst-performing offense in a decade turned […]
The Oklahoma Sooners have finally filled their vacant offensive coordinator position. Oklahoma will name Washington State offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle as their next playcaller.
He is fresh off of leading the Cougars to an 8-4 season.
The Sooners fired Seth Littrell in October after a truly disastrous offense. Oklahoma's worst-performing offense in a decade turned a promising season into an utter failure. They had Joe Jon Finley fill in as the interim offensive coordinator. His future with the team isn't certain.
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.
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. He's been terrific at scheming players open all year for Washington State, something that Oklahoma failed to do way too often.
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 sixth in EPA/dropback this season, while also boasting a fifth-ranked success rate and 11th-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 (55th in rushing yards per game), the team went from 92nd in EPA/Rush to 55th 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 20 attempts this season, with inside zone, outside 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. Don't let anyone fool you into saying he doesn't have any run game, because they are obviously clueless.
Washington State has been a decently-heavy RPO team, with 25.1% 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.
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.
Surprisingly, their motion rate wasn’t as high as I thought it would be, with Wazzu coming in at 42.4%. 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 32nd in the country in seconds per play at 24. Yet, interestingly enough, just 2.1% of their plays have been snapped with 30-34 seconds left on the play clock. 35.8% 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, 79.2% of their snaps occur after the 20-second mark on the play clock.
Where this gets interesting is what happens at quarterback with this hire. He has his own quarterback, John Mateer, whom he could bring to Norman. With Jackson Arnold likely leaving in the transfer portal, he could be the answer under center for the Sooners for the foreseeable future. However, Mateer is easily upgraded on, so the Sooners could also go in a new direction.
Regardless, seeing an Oklahoma offense with a plan will be refreshing. They'll finally have an identity on offense again, and with the talent they will return and acquire in the portal, this could be a very fun and explosive offense.
