Swole ballgame: Should quarterbacks be jacked? An ESPN investigation

COOPER MANNING HAS unique insight into the mind and psyche of quarterbacks. He's the son of a legend, Archie. He's the brother of two superstars, Peyton and Eli. And he's the father of Arch, the Texas Longhorns' starter.

A wide receiver by trade, Cooper has dealt with these guys his entire life. And every summer at the Manning Passing Academy in Thibodaux, Louisiana, he acts as the emcee, offering live play-by-play during the college QBs' skills competition on Friday night, bestowing some nicknames and checking some egos.

This year, nobody drew more attention at the Manning camp than Oklahoma star John Mateer. Most weren't focused on the hand injury from last season which caused him to miss a few weeks. Nor were they talking about his throwing motion, which he says he worked on this offseason.

Instead, the chatter was about his physique. Mateer, listed at 6-foot-1 and 224 pounds in his Oklahoma bio, was jacked. He was yoked. An image of Mateer in a sleeveless shirt and wraparound shades -- at night, no less! -- under the watchful eye of Peyton Manning caused the eyeballs emojis to pop up across social media.

"My boy Mateer had cut off the sleeves before we got the shirts out of the box," Cooper said.

Mateer was so ripped that some believed the picture was digitally enhanced by AI. That's a sad sign of the times, but also a sign of how unusual it is to see a quarterback who looks like a linebacker. So the Sooners responded with a video of Mateer hitting the smelling salts and front-squatting.

"Not AI," the post read.

Not AI 😤 @John_Mateer4pic.twitter.com/0qQ2g5owsq

— Oklahoma Football (@OU_Football) June 30, 2026

The conversation was revived more recently after a shirtless Instagram post. New Orleans Saints and former OU linebacker Danny Stutsman said Mateer was on a "legendary shirtless run;" Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss replied that Mateer needed to chill. Mateer thinks it's all hilarious. But he still doesn't want anyone to get the wrong impression. "The thing I would hate the most is for people to think I'm just some dumb big jock," Mateer said. "I don't lift like I'm just a gym bro. There's a purpose to all lifts." But he also admits that he knew his IG posts were going to stir the pot a bit. He worked hard to get here. So he let 'em know. Mateer is not the first quarterback to want to be huge.

So the image of the shredded Sooner also led to a revival of an old question: Should quarterbacks be swole? And if so, how swole is too swole?

IN 1995, FLORIDA State coach Bobby Bowden signed quarterback Dan Kendra, the massive 6-2, 240-pound athlete who was the national offensive player of the year in high school. Kendra eventually moved to fullback, reaching 255 pounds, with Bowden saying, "He would rather be in the weight room than a projection room." But maybe Kendra was merely ahead of his time. By 2007, Tim Tebow dished out enough punishment at 6-3, 236 to win a Heisman in Urban Meyer's spread offense at Florida and amazed teammates, including all-SEC center Steve Rissler, who said he saw Tebow bench-press 225 pounds 26 times as a freshman.

New Kansas State coach Collin Klein, who was once a 6-5, 226-pound wrecking ball as the Wildcats quarterback, finished third in the 2012 Heisman Trophy voting and ran for 2,485 yards in his career with 56 touchdowns. He said he was a "meathead" who loved the weight room, but now wishes he knew more about physiology than he did when he was playing.

"Can you be too swole?" Klein said. "Yes. 100%. I was muscle-bound, Everybody's body's different, though. Tebow wasn't muscle-bound, he was a flexible athlete."

Klein said there's so much more to learn about biomechanics now than he was aware of. Still, he isn't beating the meathead allegations.

"I got the bench record [for QBs]," he said proudly. "It's 395. It's still up there. We might put lights on that."

We'll mark Klein down as conflicted. But Mateer said that's not his goal.

"I don't bench-press. I don't straight-bar bench-press," Mateer said. "I don't do bicep curls. I don't hang clean, because there's no reason for me to land on my wrists and on my shoulders. So I high pull instead."

The one number he'd confess that he's proud of: dumbbell bench press, eight reps, with a 120-pounder in each hand. But while his teammates hang clean, he's doing rotational work instead.

And that's where the physiology lesson comes in, in Mateer's own words: "I'm aware and I know I can feel when I'm about to get tight. I have to stretch my lat and my teres major, my infraspinatus every day. It's just the nature of the way I throw and what I use when I throw. So I think me being aware of those things is huge. And then my T-spine is super tight, it gets tight. My lower back, rotationally, it does get tight. So it comes at a cost. But if you're able to have the looseness, then you can just create more torque because you have more force. And that's what I believe."

He's saying he's as focused on stretching as he is on lifting, especially the muscles across his back that have the most to do with throwing. The "T-spine" (the thoracic spine in the upper and mid-back) is designed to help us rotate. Most importantly, Mateer said he actually feels like he was stiffer last year, when he was 224 pounds in camp, than he is this year, when he is 224 pounds in camp, according to OU's sports information department. "There is a level of being too big," Mateer said. "There's some guys I've seen that are too big -- too stiff is the right word -- because they won't be able to move or rotate."

West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez, one of the original spread offense gurus, gets the desire to get big, he said. It's important for his guy to be in shape and be able to withstand a beating over a season.

"I don't want him to be a little skinny guy," Rodriguez said. But hold on a second. Rodriguez then remembers one of the all-time legends who came up under his watch, Pat White. The one who set an NCAA record for rushing yards by a quarterback (4,480, with 47 rushing TDs) while passing for 6,051 and 56 more scores between 2005 and 2008.

"[White] could not get over 180 pounds," Rodriguez said. "I was like, 'At some point, Pat, in your career, you're going to at least get to 200.' He never did. But he never got slow either, so I don't know."

Former Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn, who once graced the cover of Muscle & Fitness magazine, was 6-3, 232 at the NFL combine. Despite throwing for nearly 12,000 yards in college and being a two-time Heisman finalist, he told the "Dan Patrick Show" in 2013 that Jon Gruden told him during predraft meetings that he was too jacked to play QB, and that he didn't want a shredded quarterback. Quinn went in the first round anyway and started 20 games over eight seasons in the NFL. More recently, Kentucky QB Will Levis got yoked before the NFL draft and drew the same kind of reaction Mateer did before the Tennessee Titans picked him in the second round in 2023.

Oklahoma State's Eric Morris knows Mateer as well as anyone. He identified the quarterback at Little Elm when he was Washington State's offensive coordinator, extending Mateer his only FBS offer, then coached him in Pullman in 2022.

Morris found Cam Ward as a zero-star recruit when he was at Incarnate Word, then coached him there and at Washington State, helped Chandler Morris revive his career at North Texas, and took Drew Mestemaker from a walk-on who never even started in high school to leading the country in passing last year. He said he doesn't necessarily want his quarterbacks to get super big. He said his staff uses more "Tom Brady stuff," like resistance bands and rotational exercises focusing on pliability.

"I've definitely been around quarterbacks that get too big in the chest and shoulder areas and it changes their mechanics and makes them tight," he said. "We want elongated muscles."

But Morris noted he is not saying that necessarily applies to Mateer, who has the flexibility and ability to throw from a variety of arm angles, partially from his history as a baseball player. Mateer is a unique case, he said, and like Tebow, his physique fits the way he plays.

"John definitely has one of these linebacker-type bodies," Morris said. "In that conference, John's the guy that's going to want to run the football. They're going to use him in the run game. And so I think there's probably some give-and-take. Drew Mestemaker's not running quarterback power. It's not going to happen. John will run quarterback power and lower his shoulder against an SEC linebacker a hundred out of a hundred times."

MAYBE YOU JUST want your swole quarterback to have swole quarterback confidence. Mateer doesn't deny the Manning camp sleeveless shirt accusation. As a matter of fact, before his youth football camp in Norman in July, he said he called ahead to make sure the shirt was pre-cut for him.

Mateer said he saw people saying he was too big immediately after the Manning camp photos spread. But the one place he didn't hear any qualms was in Louisiana.

"Nobody at that camp said I was too big," he said, "because the people at that camp watched me throw. And I proved that I wasn't too big."

Cooper Manning -- whose own son, Arch, Mateer's Texas rival, has been seen flexing on the 'gram himself -- knows that modern quarterbacks need to beef up so they can endure tough hits, but he also believes there are other important factors at play.

"Looking good at the beach is important," he said.

Reporting from ESPN contributed to this story.