Sports

Oklahoma Coach Brent Venables Turns To 29-Year-Old Whiz Kid Ben Arbuckle To Save His Career

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The Oklahoma Sooners are one of the most storied programs in college football history, but they find themselves in a precarious position. The Sooners are just 22-16 under head coach Brent Venables and risk becoming the modern version of the Nebraska Cornhuskers if they don’t quickly figure out life in the SEC.

And so drastic times call for drastic measures. The Sooners, and Venables, are turning over the potential fate of the program to a 29-year-old prodigy by the name of Ben Arbuckle.

Arbuckle played college football for little-known West Texas A&M from 2016-17 before beginning his coaching career as a quality control assistant at Houston Baptist. After a year at the high school ranks, he followed Zack Kittley from Houston Baptist to Western Kentucky.

(Kittley, who is just 33 years old in his own right, recently became the head coach at Florida Atlantic.)

When Kittley left WKU for Texas Tech, Arbuckle became the offensive coordinator and continued his incredible rise through the ranks. One year later, he was named the offensive coordinator at Washington State University.

Arbuckle led a shockingly good Cougars offensive in 2024. Wazzu posted an 8-4 record (its best since 2018) behind the strength of the nation’s 12th-ranked scoring offense (36.8 PPG).

It’s an immense risk for Oklahoma. After all, six years ago Arbuckle was working part-time as an Uber Eats driver. But it’s not without some precedent. In 2015, Sooners legend Bob Stoops hired a then-unknown 32-year-old named Lincoln Riley to be his offensive coordinator. That seemed to work out okay in the short term.

Maybe Arbuckle flops. But maybe, like Riley, he proves to be one of the nation’s top offensive minds. If he is, Venables may have just made a bold move to save not only his coaching career, but the future of one of college football’s blue blood programs.