Oklahoma knows the standard, and lately the offense hasn’t met it.
That’s the heart of the issue in Norman. The Sooners have spent the last two seasons trying to rediscover the kind of firepower that used to be baked into the program’s identity, and for a place like OU, that kind of slide doesn’t get brushed aside.
Winning isn’t optional there. Excellence is the expectation.
For most of Oklahoma’s history, offense has been the program’s calling card. The Sooners didn’t invent the Split-T or the Wishbone, but under Bud Wilkinson and later Barry Switzer, they made those systems sing better than anybody else. Then came the Bob Stoops era, when Oklahoma hired into the modern game and became a spread and Air Raid force without ever losing its reputation as an offensive heavyweight.
That’s what makes the recent dip so jarring. Since 1999, the Sooners have usually been a machine on that side of the ball.
From Mike Leach and Mark Mangino to Chuck Long, Kevin Wilson, Josh Heupel, Lincoln Riley and Jeff Lebby, Oklahoma has had no shortage of offensive minds. From 1999 to 2023, OU averaged fewer than 30 points per game only once, and three times it finished with the nation’s best offense.
More often than not, the Sooners were living above 35 points a night.
Then 2024 happened.
With Seth Littrell and then Joe Jon Finley handling the play-calling after Littrell was fired, Oklahoma produced what was easily its worst offense since John Blake’s final season in 1998. That forced a reset, and the answer was Ben Arbuckle, hired to bring the Air Raid back to Norman and breathe life into the attack again.
The first year of that new direction in 2025 brought progress, but not enough of it. Oklahoma improved, made the College Football Playoff, and still leaned heavily on the defense to get there. The offense was better, but it still wasn’t OU-level good.
Now the Sooners are banking on another jump in 2026. Arbuckle is back, and so is his hand-picked quarterback, John Mateer. That pairing gives Oklahoma reason to believe the offense can take another step forward this fall.
There’s already a blueprint for how Brent Venables can fix one side of the ball. When he arrived, the defense needed a rescue job of its own, and after a couple of seasons, he has restored that side of the program. The 2025 defense was Oklahoma’s best statistically since 2009, when Venables was also calling the shots on that side.
But the imbalance has shifted. For years, especially during Riley’s tenure, the defense was the problem. Under Venables, the offense has become the side that has lagged behind over the last two seasons.
That leaves Venables with a challenge Riley never solved from the other direction: getting steady, elite production from the side of the ball he doesn’t specialize in. The best Oklahoma teams under Stoops had that balance. So did the great Wilkinson and Switzer teams.
Venables has shown he can oversee an elite offense before. In 2023, Oklahoma averaged more than 40 points per game and finished with a top-five offense nationally. But that kind of output has been the exception, not the rule, just as Riley’s best defense in 2020 was an outlier at 22 points allowed per game and a top-30 ranking.
The message is clear enough. Oklahoma has already done the hard work of getting the defense back to where it belongs.
If the offense can follow suit, the Sooners could become dangerous fast. Both units have to click for OU to get where it wants to go.
The offense has to get back to being explosive. The Sooners have to start looking like the Sooners again on both sides of the ball.
In Other News...
Sooners Fans Still Can't Agree On These Costly Portal Misses
The transfer portal has given Oklahoma plenty to evaluate, and not every swing has landed the way fans hoped. John Mateer still has another year to show what he can become, but the bigger conversation around recent additions has centered on players who arrived with real expectations and never quite matched them on the field.
Dasan McCullough and Jaydn Ott are the names that keep coming up for all the wrong reasons, while Austin Stogners return offered familiarity without a true return to his earlier impact. For a fan base that has watched the Sooners chase roster upgrades through the portal, those misses have become part of the larger debate over how much certainty there really is in this era of college football roster building. [Read more 🡒]
Oklahoma Fans Still Hate How These Portal Losses Aged
The portal has a way of making old decisions look louder with time, and Oklahoma has plenty of reminders scattered across the sport. Dillon Gabriel settled in at Oregon, Cayden Green found a bigger role at Missouri, Hollywood Smothers has grown into a featured back at NC State, and Brenen Thompson has turned into a real threat at Mississippi State. For Sooners fans, it is less about any one departure than the collective feeling that the roster lost too much talent too fast, with each exit carrying a different kind of what-if.
Theo Wease Jr. adds another layer to that frustration because his time in Norman never quite matched the promise that made him such a coveted recruit. He flashed in 2020 and then left behind the sense that Oklahoma had only begun to tap into what he could do, which is exactly the sort of unfinished business that tends to linger when a program is trying to build around continuity. And while one high-profile name was left out of the discussion for obvious reasons, the broader point remains the same: the Sooners have spent plenty of time watching former players become bigger stories elsewhere. [Read more 🡒]
Oklahomas Offensive Line Faces Its Biggest Test Since The 2024 Mess
Oklahomas offensive line took a real step forward in 2025, especially in pass protection, after the mess that defined the previous year. The run game still lagged behind, but there was enough improvement to give Brent Venables some reason to believe the group could keep building, particularly with the continuity and experience that had started to settle in.
Now the Sooners have to answer their biggest personnel question of the offseason without one of the units most dependable voices. Febechi Nwaiwu is gone, and with him goes a veteran presence Venables viewed as part of the lines leadership backbone, leaving Oklahoma to sort out which returning blocker can fill that glue-guy role as the 2026 season approaches. [Read more 🡒]