Temple will have its hands full with Oklahoma QB John Mateer
Katin Surprenant remembers watching Oklahoma quarterback John Mateer play at Washington State.
“He’s a hard runner, he’s hard to take down,” Temple’s redshirt senior linebacker said during the team’s weekly Monday press conference. “You saw it with Michigan. They ran him a lot.”
This Saturday, instead of watching him on television, Surprenant will be one of the players tasked with defending the Sooners’ dual-threat quarterback when No. 13 Oklahoma visits Lincoln Financial Field to take on Temple. Kickoff is set for noon Saturday, and the game will be nationally televised on ESPN2.
The Owls are off to their first 2-0 start since 2019, but Saturday will mark a significant step up in competition for a Temple team that did pretty much everything it was supposed to do in routing UMass and Howard through the season’s first two weeks.
Once Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables hired Washington State offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle and quarterbacks coach John Kuceyeski last December, Mateer wasn’t far behind as the No. 2 overall player in the On3 Industry Transfer Rankings. Mateer backed up Cam Ward for two seasons at Washington State before Ward transferred to Miami and eventually became the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. Once he got his chance last season as the Cougars’ starter, he did not disappoint, passing for 3,139 yards and 29 touchdowns while completing nearly 65% of his passes and racking up 825 yards and 15 more touchdowns on the ground.
Mateer nearly followed Ward to Miami, but 1Oklahoma, the Sooners’ primary NIL collective, had something to say about that, and now Mateer is Temple’s problem this Saturday.
“When they want to get a yard or they need to make a play, they put the ball in his hands,” Temple head coach K.C. Keeler said Monday. “I think that’s a combination of his talent, but also the comfortable-ness that the o-coordinator has with him. That’s his guy.”
Mateer went 21-of-34 passing for 270 yards, a touchdown and an interception and also carried the ball 19 times for 74 yards and two scores in Oklahoma’s 24-13 win of No. 15 Michigan, one that knocked the Wolverines down to 23rd in the latest AP Poll. The week prior, Mateer put up gaudy numbers in his Oklahoma debut, a 35-3 win over Illinois State in which Mateer went 30-for-37 passing for 392 yards and three touchdowns while scoring a fourth on the ground.
The Sooners do have some capable running backs in Tony Blaylock and Jovante Barnes, but Mateer has led Oklahoma in carries (26) and rushing yards (98) through the season’s first two weeks, and he has plenty of capable pass-catching targets in wideouts Deion Burks, Keontez Lewis and Isaiah Sategna III, along with tight end Jaren Kanak.
Mateer was a focal point of Monday’s weekly press conference, which also included a conversation with Temple wide receiver Kajiya Hollawayne, who has two touchdown catches so far this season. You can listen to those interviews here.
