Oklahoma
Three Questions on Oklahoma Training Camp: Quarterbacks
Oklahoma opens preseason training camp this week, and the Sooners have some questions to get answered during the month of August.
In this series, Sooners on SI will attempt to provide some answers ahead of camp.
Last in the series is a look inside Oklahoma’s quarterbacks room.
Coach Brent Venables confidently stated during spring practice that Oklahoma’s quarterback room is in better shape in 2024 than it was in his previous two years.
From a depth standpoint, that seems irrefutable.
From an experience standpoint — not so much.
Aside from starter Jackson Arnold’s one career start last year in the Alamo Bowl, only sixth-year senior Casey Thompson has game experience.
“There was a lot of unknown after Jackson,” Venables said.
Thompson started 23 games and played in 35 at Texas, Nebraska and Florida Atlantic. Now he’s wrapping up his compelling college football career at his dream school, his dad’s school, but even that comes with a significant hitch: Thompson is coming off major knee surgery from an injury last fall.
Michael Hawkins seemed to win the backup job in spring as Thompson rehabbed his knee, but Hawkins — ultra-talented as he may be — is a true freshman. So is Brendan Zurbrugg.
“I feel like we have more guys there than what we had a year ago,” Venables said.
That’s not under dispute. Four scholarship QBs is better than three. And with Gabriel settling in at Oregon, Davis Beville off to South Carolina, walk-on General Booty now at Louisiana Monroe and walk-on Jacob Switzer having moved on, new offensive coordinator Seth Littrell watched four of his five quarterbacks transfer out of Norman.
“That’s the depth at the position more than we had a year ago,” Venables said.
But Venables thinks the upgrade this year goes beyond just numbers.
He’s talked about leadership, of course, and how that’s continuing to grow and evolve. But he’s also described OU’s improved athletic ability and natural talent and big, explosive passing arms at the position.
OU has loads of the latter.
“We feel good about it,” Venables said.
Arnold has said he wasn’t fully ready for the spotlight of being the Oklahoma starting quarterback when he took the field last December against Arizona.
He said the Wildcats’ defense tricked him and surprised him in the Alamo Bowl, that he misread some things and threw some passes that he shouldn’t have.
It was a roller-coaster ending to his true freshman season.
But this is Oklahoma. Expectations are galactically high. Just Monday, Arnold was on the preseason watch list for the Maxwell Award as college football’s top overall player.
Josh Heupel won a national title here. Jason White won a Heisman. So did Sam Bradford, while setting NCAA records. Landry Jones shattered OU’s career passing marks. Baker Mayfield won three straight Big 12 titles and played in two playoff games while also winning a Heisman. Kyler Murray also won a Heisman and helped redefine the position. Jalen Hurts was a Heisman runner-up and elevated the position with his leadership.
“Jackson understands better than anybody what goes into being a quarterback of a football team of the locker room: the leader, the face, the responsibilities, the challenges,” Venables said.
One full calendar year studying the game under Gabriel — and former offensive coordinator Jeff Lebby — should have given Arnold a firm foundation as he takes the reins.
But he’ll need to raise his game in 2024. None of those other OU legends played against an SEC schedule like Arnold will in his first full college season as a starting quarterback.
Arnold also needs to just be himself. He doesn’t need to complete 75 percent of his passes or rush for 1,000 yards. He received the Gatorade National Player of the Year as a senior at Denton Guyer High School for a reason: he’s a really good football player.
Stats will come (even against the SEC). Awards may follow. But if Arnold can avoid catastrophic turnovers and lead the OU offense to points, the Sooners will win games — and that’s all the fan base wants, although they sure like those giant statues on the east side of Memorial Stadium, too.
“There’s a lot of pressure that comes with this position for sure,” Arnold said. “Again, at the end of the day, I just gotta go out and perform to the best of my abilities and hope I live up to that lineage.”
Although Thompson probably disagrees, it’s close to even money that Hawkins will get the first backup reps on Aug. 30 when the Sooners take on Temple.
Hawkins earned that opportunity last spring. A highly dynamic dual-threat QB from Frisco (TX) Emerson via Allen, TX, the 6-foot-1, 204-pound Hawkins was the quarterback MVP at the 2023 Dallas Rivals Camp, won the Accuracy Challenge Award at the 2023 Dallas Under Armour Next Camp, and was an Elite 11 Finalist.
At Emerson — an almost brand new school still accumulating talent — he led his squad to the Texas 5A semifinals with 4,211 yards total offense and 55 touchdowns with only three interceptions in 15 games. He was district MVP as a senior and was first-team all-district as a junior.
Hawkins excited his coaches and teammates with his steady, spectacular performance in spring practice — all while Thompson was made to sit out while rehabbing his knee.
However, Thompson was fully cleared earlier this summer. He has no restrictions, Venables said. He’ll probably still need a little extra time to get into game shape — he’ll be 26 in October — so expect him to be the emergency QB in September.
But when SEC play arrives, don’t be surprised to see Thompson on the field as Arnold’s primary backup. He’s played in and won numerous big games in his career, has accumulated 5,338 yards and 52 TD passes, and it seems likely that Venables will lean on that kind of experience as the schedule gets tougher.
Oklahoma
Retired St. Louis Cardinals Star Matt Holliday Selling Oklahoma Home With a Baseball Field and a ‘$2 Million Pool’
Retired St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Matt Holliday is selling his Oklahoma home, and fittingly, it has its very own baseball field.
The gated 136-acre estate in Stillwater—about an hour north of Oklahoma City—is asking $12 million, a price tag that makes it the most expensive single-family home on the market in the Sooner State, listing records show.
MORE: Arizona’s Most Expensive Home—With a Shark Tank, Basketball Arena and Shooting Range—Lists for $40 Million
Holliday, 46, a Stillwater native, acquired the lot for $3 million in 2018, records with PropertyShark show. He and his wife, Leslee, built the home in 2022.
“One of the things I’ve loved most about this home is the opportunity it has given us to gather people together,” Holliday said in a statement to Mansion Global. “Some of our favorite memories here revolve around hosting college students and professional athletes for meals, conversation and meaningful fellowship.”
The property is “a super unique home for Oklahoma,” said listing agent Wyatt Poindexter of the Agency, who brought the home to the market on Wednesday.
The field is a real rarity. “I’ve never seen one [before] in my life, and I’ve been in real estate for 31 years,” Poindexter said. It has professional lighting and turf, stands, and right behind home plate there’s a massive fire pit, according to Poindexter. The property also has batting cages.
Both were added “for practice for the boys, and for fun,” Poindexter said.
Two of Holliday’s sons are following in their father’s footsteps. Jackson was selected first overall in the 2022 Major League Baseball draft by the Baltimore Orioles and made his MLB debut in 2024, and Ethan went fourth overall to the Colorado Rockies in 2025.
Holliday “pretty much trained them on site,” Poindexter said.
During his 14-year career, Holliday, a seven-time All-Star, played for the Colorado Rockies along with the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees. But his longest and most well-known tenure was with the St. Louis Cardinals, with whom he won the World Series in 2011.
The property’s amenities extend beyond baseball, though. There’s a putting green, a gym, an indoor pickleball and basketball court, and a two-level pool with a waterfall.
“The pool is massive,” Poindexter said. “It has a swim-through grotto with seating and benches. It’s a $2 million pool.”
There’s also a hot tub, an outdoor kitchen, a pond, a guest house, a workshop and running trails.
The house itself, meanwhile, spans 7,500 square feet over a single level and was inspired by Texas Hill Country homes with their metal roofs and stone exteriors, Poindexter explained.
The house is being sold furnished, with the exception of the MLB memorabilia. It has oversized windows; an open-plan main living space with a lounge, kitchen and dining area; a butler’s pantry; two offices; and five bedrooms, including a primary suite with dual closets.
“There’s something special about a home that naturally invites community, and this one has been the backdrop for so many unforgettable evenings, shared stories and lasting relationships,” Holliday said.
Oklahoma
Chemical engineering researchers earn first publication for Oklahoma in top AI conference – Oklahoma State University
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Media Contact:
Desa James | Communications Coordinator | 405-744-2669 | desa.james@okstate.edu
Dr. Zeyuan Song, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the School of Chemical Engineering at
Oklahoma State University, and Dr. Zheyu Jiang, assistant professor for CHE, have achieved
a milestone rarely seen in Oklahoma’s research landscape: acceptance into the International
Conference on Learning Representations 2026, one of the world’s most competitive and
influential academic conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
ICLR ranks among the top AI venues globally – second in the field by h-index – and
is known for debuting many of the breakthroughs that have shaped modern AI, including
the variational autoencoder and the graph attention network. Each submission undergoes
a monthslong, double-blind review and rebuttal process, making acceptance highly selective.
“I am proud of the research excellence Zeyuan achieved during his Ph.D. study in my research
lab,” Jinag said. “I have been impressed by his ability to bring in new ideas from
diverse fields in mathematics, engineering, and AI. This, when combined with a deep
understanding of the cutting-edge breakthroughs in the field, leads to this outstanding
work published in ICLR.”
Song’s paper, titled Adaptive Fourier Mamba Operators, introduces a powerful new machine
learning framework for modeling complex natural and engineering phenomena described
by partial differential equations.
“Imagine you are baking a cake,” Jiang said. “The temperature of the cake isn’t determined by
time alone. The outside heats faster than the inside, and the top browns more quickly
than the bottom. Partial differential equations describe changes that happen simultaneously
in space and time, like how heat moves through a cake as it bakes.”
These types of equations govern real-world phenomena such as fluid dynamics, heat
transfer, quantum mechanics and even the financial market.
Unlike traditional numerical solvers, which can become extremely time-consuming to solve,
Song’s AFMO method uses a mathematically grounded neural operator framework to learn
how these systems behave, often with greater efficiency and generalizability.
According to the paper, AFMO integrates two computational frameworks, Adaptive Fourier
decomposition, a novel signal processing technique that builds orthogonal spectral
bases tailored to the problem, and state-space models, an emerging neural network
architecture that can efficiently handle long-range dependencies, to solve general nonlinear partial
differential equations.
“Imagine you are playing piano,” Jiang said. “Standard Fourier neural operator plays every
song on a standard piano. The piano keys are fixed, and you play by mixing those fixed
notes. It works great when the song fits that instrument well, but it can struggle
if the ‘song’ has unusual rhythms. Adaptive Fourier decomposition, on the other hand,
is like a custom keyboard tailored to the particular song one wants to play.
“Meanwhile, a state-space model is like a super-fast musician who reads the music
left-to-right and keeps a small memory of what happened so far, so they can play very
long songs efficiently. Therefore, AFMO builds a custom instrument for each song first,
and then has the super-fast musician to play it, so it has the right instrument and
efficient playing.”
By uniting these in a novel way, AFMO can solve PDEs on irregular shapes and complex
geometries, capture sharp features and singularities, and produce results that are
both highly accurate and computationally efficient.
“These are especially challenging problems to solve due to the intricacies of the systems
involved,” Jiang said. “They require us to think out of the box and develop truly innovative solutions.”
In extensive testing, the method consistently outperformed leading neural operator
models across diverse benchmark problems, ranging from modeling fluid flow in airfoils
and pipes to predicting European option prices in financial mathematics.
Song’s accomplishment represents more than an individual’s success.
This publication is the first ICLR paper from the state of Oklahoma. Notably, this work comes from
a chemical engineering department, rather than a traditional computer science or electrical
engineering program.
“As AI continuously transforms the world, we are in an exciting era for interdisciplinary
research,” Jiang said. “We are thrilled to see the broader impacts and implications
of this work in helping OSU recruit talented students, forming cross-department collaborations,
and competing for more federal and industry funding to support AI for Science research that pushes
toward AI capacity and workforce development in Oklahoma.”
Oklahoma
How earmarked funds help upgrade Oklahoma communities
Earmark is the term many know, but technically it’s congressionally directed spending in the Senate, community project funding in the House, which is exactly what earmarks are: funding directed by members of Congress for projects in their community.
Fifth District Congresswoman Stephanie Bice visited the Edmond Water Treatment Plant on Tuesday to present city leaders with a symbolic check for $4 million.
The money is part of the Housing and Urban Development budget and is to be used to update the electrical grid in a city that, like all municipalities in Oklahoma, is funded predominantly through sales tax.
“Sometimes the revenue doesn’t meet the need, and this is one way that I can actually bring federal dollars back home to Oklahoma to help my communities across the 5th district,” said Bice.
Federal dollars like this have helped upgrade the 911 center in Logan County, the airport in Chandler, and the Forensic Science Institute at UCO.
Bice facilitated funding for 15 projects this way, and she’s certainly not alone. According to the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation, Fiscal Year 26 appropriations contained just over 7600 earmarks, totaling about $14.3 billion, less than 1% of all discretionary. The Oklahoma delegation accounted for 66 of those earmarks, worth about $314 million.
“These are dollars that would have been spent by agencies, by federal agencies, and I think it’s incumbent upon me as an elected official representing this community to be able to secure those dollars and bring them back home for projects that are really vital,” said Bice.
By law, the projects are listed on each member’s website.
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