Oklahoma lost the Dillon Gabriel breakup, but here’s what it would look like to lose the Jackson Arnold breakup

I can’t imagine how it felt to be an Oklahoma fan who watched how last year played out with Dillon Gabriel and Jackson Arnold. It would’ve been one thing if Gabriel went to Oregon and led the Ducks to the Playoff while Arnold had a good, but not great, first season as the OU starting quarterback. It was a decision that was made with the program’s long-term future in mind, so the breakup didn’t necessarily have to be decided by the end of 2024.

Instead, though, Sooner fans had to watch Gabriel earn a trip to New York for the Big Ten champs while Oklahoma set offensive football back decades.

Just in case that wasn’t enough, OU got constant reminders that Gabriel, as my guy Berry Tramel of the Tulsa World said, “didn’t hold OU hostage for $3-4 million,” and he would’ve stayed for the going rate. There’s not an Oklahoma fan on the planet who could say with a straight face, “we won the Dillon Gabriel breakup.”

Arnold since found a new home at Auburn, while Oklahoma will have its 3rd starting quarterback in as many years when Washington State transfer John Mateer takes those first snaps on Aug. 30 against Illinois State.

So can Oklahoma win the breakup this time? Or at the very least, can it at least have 1 Oklahoma fan on the planet who can say with a straight face, “we won the Jackson Arnold breakup?” That’ll entail a few things.

Yes, Sept. 20 will have a huge say in that

In case you don’t have the Oklahoma schedule memorized just yet (I would encourage you to move that up your list of summer priorities), Sept. 20 is when Arnold and Auburn will come to Norman. It’s ironic that Arnold’s SEC debut with his new team will be against his old team and his old coach, Brent Venables, who benched him before halftime of his SEC debut last year. That night, Oklahoma laid the groundwork for losing 2 breakups. Not only did it come as a brutal development for the Arnold-Gabriel dynamic, but it was also the night that former Oklahoma quarterback/offensive coordinator Josh Heupel won the breakup by leading Tennessee to a victory in Norman.

This year’s reunion will have a different feel. Unlike Heupel, who was in the midst of leading Tennessee to its best 3-year stretch of the post-Phillip Fulmer era, Arnold is still trying to establish himself. That’ll be true even if he sets the world on fire in Auburn’s 3 games.

Plenty of Oklahoma fans will be eager to see if Arnold has corrected the ball-security issues that plagued him as a redshirt freshman in 2024. A turnover-heavy showing from Arnold in a losing effort would make for a steep climb the rest of the way for the former Sooner to win the breakup. Some might claim that would be a deal-breaker, even if it was the start of an All-SEC season for Arnold while Mateer struggled with consistency.

It’ll be interesting to see the side-by-side between those 2 guys. In 2024, they were incredibly different players. Mateer was much more willing to attack downfield (63 pass attempts of 20+ yards compared to 30 for Arnold), and he was much more consistent as a runner. Arnold, with an offensive line that worked through 8 different combinations, was under pressure on 40.4% of his dropbacks (Mateer was at 29.6%). It was easy to forget that Mateer had twice as many turnover-worthy plays (16-8) as Arnold.

It almost felt like Arnold was the guy who would make mistakes because he was too afraid to make mistakes while Mateer was the guy who knew he had grace to make mistakes and played freely. Again, Arnold was the guy who got benched before halftime of his first SEC game while Mateer was the guy who had such belief from his head coach that he declared him “the best player in college football” for 2025.

Yes, it’s safe to say that Jake Dickert is a massive fan of Mateer even though both of them went their separate ways after 2024 at Washington State. But the bar for Oklahoma to win the Mateer breakup isn’t “best player in the country or bust.” He might not even need to finish as one of the 2 best SEC quarterbacks.

If Mateer just lives up to the preseason buzz, Oklahoma wins the Arnold breakup by a landslide

The preseason buzz is that Mateer is a top-10 quarterback in the country. Maybe that’s a bit ambitious for someone with 1 season as an FBS starter, which was mostly against a Mountain West schedule. After all, PFF charted Mateer as being responsible for allowing the 2nd-most sacks of any quarterback in FBS (14), and half of his games ended with him having PFF passing grade lower than 61.0.

Then again, he led FBS in quarterback rating in November, and he was tied for No. 1 among FBS quarterbacks with 54 missed tackles forced. That was 3 times as many as Arnold, who obviously faced a different level of competition than Mateer.

That’s something that Arnold has working in his favor in 2025. He already saw how quick the decision-making process is against SEC defenses. We still need to see how Mateer handles that transition.

There’s another thing that Arnold has working in his favor — an immensely talented receiver room.

At Oklahoma, he watched his receivers drop like flies. At Auburn, he’ll enter the season with a receiver room that looks like one of the nation’s best with Cam Coleman and Georgia Tech transfer Eric Singleton. If you were hand-picking who has the more favorable group of pass catchers, Auburn wins that argument against Oklahoma comfortably (just don’t sleep on Deion Burks becoming an All-SEC guy if he can stay healthy for OU).

Mateer has a better shot of overcoming that than Arnold would because of the rushing ability, but it’d be a tough look for Oklahoma if Arnold started carving up defenses with a receiver room that can actually stay on the field.

So much of the breakup will be centered on if Arnold gets improved surroundings on The Plains

A depleted receiver room coupled with an inexperienced and ineffective offensive line didn’t help, and while you could argue that Arnold was partially responsible for a midseason coordinator firing, nobody will pretend that he had ideal Year 1 starter surroundings.

To be fair, we don’t know that he’s getting some major upgrade with his offensive play-caller. Hugh Freeze might’ve delivered Auburn its first top-40 passing offense since 1997, but he still had a quarterback in Payton Thorne who turned the ball over too much and struggled in crucial moments. That describes Arnold at this stage of his career, and unlike Mateer, who will have the benefit of staying with offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle, his toughest transition is getting on the same page as Freeze. Freeze’s track record with quarterbacks in Year 1 in his system isn’t great — don’t forget that former Auburn transfer Malik Willis redshirted his first year with Freeze at Liberty — and Arnold is being tasked with looking like the best version of himself from the jump.

Remember, Freeze is facing significant pressure to have a multi-win improvement in 2025. There’s no long game to be played with Arnold. If he isn’t cutting it after a month on the job, he won’t have unlimited grace to figure things out.

Will he have enough grace to reach halftime of his first SEC start? That remains to be seen.

(That was a joke. I can’t imagine there’s any world in which Freeze benches Arnold before halftime of that showdown at Oklahoma. If he does, Arnold should file a self-restraining order that keeps him 100 miles from stepping foot in Norman.)

Oklahoma fans will watch Arnold closely in 2025. In some ways, it’s a familiar feeling. Spencer Rattler, Caleb Williams and Gabriel all left in the last 4 years. At a place that could be considered “QBU” of the 21st century, OU hasn’t had a starting quarterback begin and end his career at the position since Landry Jones, who played his final college game in 2012 (he’s now a 36-year-old analyst on Heupel’s staff at Tennessee). Arnold was supposed to end that. We know that Mateer won’t end that. For now, that’s on the back burner. Winning the breakup is more important.

Winning the breakup doesn’t mean that Oklahoma fans should actively root against Arnold. He didn’t quit midseason, he didn’t trash the fanbase and he didn’t bolt for a bag. It just didn’t work out. Even with 5-star quarterbacks like Arnold, it happens. If it still doesn’t happen at Auburn, that shouldn’t prompt some victory lap, either.

But if it works out in a major way for Arnold while OU loses another quarterback breakup, Venables might be out of chances to make those decisions.

Connor O’Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He’s a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.