Reunion or revenge? Transfers facing their old teams a new part of the season
AROUND MIDDAY SATURDAY, Jackson Arnold will hop off a bus and walk into Gaylord Family - Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.
He will know his way around but won't take the familiar route toward the home locker room. Nor will he put on the crimson and white Oklahoma jersey. Instead, he will suit up for Auburn and begin final preparations for a game brimming with emotion and nostalgia.
Arnold, ESPN's No. 2 recruit in the 2023 class, was supposed to be the next great quarterback at Oklahoma, which has produced three Heisman Trophy winners, a Heisman runner-up and a series of all-league and All-America selections since 2015. But a rough 2024 season led him and the Sooners to part ways. He entered the transfer portal and found a new team. And, like many transfers, Arnold will now line up against his former team.
"He's very mature and he doesn't give any credit to any noise or talk," Auburn coach Hugh Freeze said. "He's a pro. We all understand people might cheer for him, boo him, whatever it is. I think he's mentally strong."
Arnold's situation has become a weekly occurrence around college football, even in the young 2025 season. Last week, Duke quarterback Darian Mensah returned to New Orleans and faced Tulane, the team he helped to a 9-2 start last season before landing an NIL deal with the Blue Devils that could pay him $8 million over two seasons.
When Kansas State and Arizona met last Friday in Tucson, safety Gunner Maldonado and wide receiver Tre Spivey were suiting up for different sets of Wildcats. Maldonado is in his first season at Kansas State after four with Arizona, and Spivey is in his first with Arizona after two with Kansas State.
Earl Little Jr. transferred from Alabama after the 2023 season, slogged through a 2-10 campaign with Florida State last fall and then opened this season on Aug. 30 against his former team, recording a team-high nine tackles as the Seminoles stunned the Crimson Tide.
Transfer reunions are now baked into this era of college football, requiring a delicate yet intentional approach from all those involved as they try to not only get through the games but come out with wins.
"This is not new," Duke coach Manny Diaz told ESPN before the Tulane game. "There have been guys through the years we've had that have faced a former team, and certainly in pro sports, this happens all the time. If you deny the emotional part, then you know you're doing yourself a disservice, but once you recognize that the emotions are what they are, then it's still just a game."
WHEN A TRANSFER reunion looms, coaches and players are constantly taking the emotional temperature. Florida State's Little had to hear about the Alabama game throughout the offseason.
"I had people coming for my neck every day, talking about the big game or what I was going to do and everything, but I didn't listen to the outside noise," he said.
Arnold, who didn't meet with reporters this week, had a similar response when asked about Oklahoma following Auburn's win against South Alabama. He said he's not on social media, joking that "there's no noise for me."
The emotional component is heightened for these games and cannot be ignored. Texas coach Steve Sarkisian kept an eye on defensive lineman Hero Kanu in the leadup to the season opener at Ohio State, the team Kanu played for in 2024.
"I try to get a pretty good sense of the feel for our players throughout the summer, throughout fall camp," Sarkisian said. "Then, I try to monitor the player that [game] week, and if I feel like they're getting out of character, I address it. If I feel like they're practicing well, they're being themselves, I don't address it. Sometimes you can make something out of nothing when you start to do things like that.
"With Hero, I thought he was in a great place going into the game, and I thought he played well in the game. I never addressed it with him one time."
Freeze didn't play college football, but he has been through an experience similar to what Arnold will go through this week. As Liberty's coach in 2021, he returned to Ole Miss, where he coached from 2012 until being fired shortly before the 2017 season.
"That whole week, it was a challenge for me not to think about some of that," Freeze said. "I know the same will be true for Jackson. ... My advice to him is to just keep the focus on our team. That was my advice to myself. It's not about you. It's not about me. It's about our team preparing to go in to play."
Little focused on keeping "a calm mind" when he arrived at Doak Campbell Stadium for the opener against Alabama. When Florida State's defensive backs began warmups, he ran into some former Alabama teammates and others from the program whom he knew from his time there.
They briefly exchanged greetings.
"No bad blood at all, it was all good vibes," Little said.
Weeks after Stanford fired coach Troy Taylor, wide receiver Tiger Bachmeier and his younger brother, Bear, an incoming freshman quarterback, entered the transfer portal. As BYU came into focus as their likely destination, the Bachmeier brothers immediately noticed that the team would be hosting Stanford in Week 2.
As soon as BYU finished its season-opening win against Portland State, Tiger Bachmeier sensed what was coming.
"You start to get a bit of anxiousness, not nervousness or nastiness," he said. "You can't really explain it. There's something eerie and weird about the feeling."
Although Bear Bachmeier would end up starting for BYU, he had been at Stanford for only a few months. Tiger, meanwhile, had started 13 games for the Cardinal and earned his computer science degree there in 2½ years.
"You build lasting relationships, and then when you pull the plug on that, it's definitely an emotional thing," Tiger Bachmeier said. "It was more detached for Bear."
Arizona coach Brent Brennan said it's important to recognize that transfers have a range of experiences with their former teams and those they left behind. When reunion games come around, his message is the same: Regardless of how things went before, the focus must remain on the current team and its mission.
Like other coaches, Brennan doesn't amplify the situation, but he doesn't ignore it, either.
"It might be a simple one-off conversation at the beginning of the week and then a reminder somewhere late in the week," Brennan said. "You're trying to keep them locked into the team and what the team needs from them on that day, and just trying to help them navigate any of the emotions they might have, and not letting that become either a distraction for your team or detrimental to their own play."
COACHES ARE TASKED with getting every player ready to perform on game days. They're also trying to gain every advantage possible, including potential intel on the opponent.
"I would say there probably is [information gathering]," Florida coach Billy Napier said, while adding, "not that you would talk about it [publicly]."
Last week, Arkansas faced an Ole Miss team that added three Razorbacks transfers in the offseason: offensive lineman Patrick Kutas, cornerback Jaylon Braxton and tight end Luke Hasz. Offensive lineman Kavion Broussard, meanwhile, came to Arkansas from Ole Miss and has seen action this season.
The transactions could have impacted both teams in their preparation, especially since Arkansas and Ole Miss have the same head coaches and primary coordinators from 2024.
"I'm sure that there's conversations going on about calls and teaching and how we did things here, maybe," Arkansas coach Sam Pittman said before the team's 41-35 loss at Ole Miss. "... It's not just Ole Miss, it's anybody that transfers, where they could possibly help their team win a game. So we certainly understand that and are aware of that."
When coaches get information, they also must assess how much, if at all, to adjust their plans.
"There's a fine line in there, and sometimes you can start to outsmart yourself," Sarkisian said. "Every team you play knows that they have a player that is a former player on your team. And then, OK, what do we need to change? What do we need to adjust? Sometimes you can get that information and then a coach can outsmart you. ... I just think you have to be careful when it comes to trying to get information for former players from a school, assuming they know that player and they can outfox us."
How Oklahoma coach Brent Venables defends Arnold will be a major subplot to Saturday's game. On Tuesday, Venables applauded Arnold's early success with Auburn after a 2024 season in which he eclipsed 200 passing yards just once.
Venables said he sees "the same guy ... with a healthy football team around him," referring to the surge of injuries that hit Oklahoma's wide receiver group and other areas of the offense last fall. The coach also downplayed the potential advantage he will have in scheming against his former quarterback.
"Guys can change from one year to the next," Venables said. "There's a lot that you don't know, because you're not with them for the last eight months. ... Jackson's one of the most talented players in all of college football. He's can throw, he's got a big arm, he can run, he's got a great capacity intellectually and great leadership skills, he's been a winner his whole life. So I don't think there's any kind of advantage whatsoever.
"He saw our defense every single day in practice, so there's going to be a familiarity to that."
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BEFORE BYU HOSTED Stanford, Tiger Bachmeier's Cougars teammates quizzed him about some of Stanford's players. Bachmeier, who describes himself as "pretty positive on everyone," tried to highlight their best qualities.
"I enjoyed telling funny stories about the guys and the memories, character traits versus how he sets blocks," Bachmeier said. "I don't know if that's what they were looking for. Some of those guys are my best friends."
After leaving for BYU in the spring, Bachmeier stayed in contact with several Stanford players. The correspondence dwindled during training camp. When game week arrived, they simply wished each other good luck and asked if they should take pictures before or after the game.
One Stanford player suggested a pregame prayer. Before a game last year at Stanford Stadium, Bachmeier had met his brother Hank, a quarterback at Wake Forest, in the tunnel and they prayed together. But the group prayer was harder to coordinate.
"That was a really, really weird atmosphere during pregame because you're trying to stay focused and you see your friends who you haven't seen for five months," Tiger Bachmeier said. "You want to say, 'What's up?'"
After the game, Bachmeier got a chance to see wide receiver Myles Libman, safety Charlie Eckhardt and offensive lineman Fisher Anderson -- and take pictures.
"We all kind of ran up to each other and gave each other hugs for five straight minutes," Bachmeier said. "That's what it's all about."
Little was hoping to see his Alabama friends after the opener, but Florida State fans had other ideas after the Seminoles' 31-17 win.
"The field got rushed pretty quickly, so I unfortunately couldn't go and holler at some of my old teammates," Little said. "All the fans were jumping on me. I couldn't say anything to those guys."
He reached out to a few, but "they were mad at me," Little joked, adding that the Alabama players did offer their congratulations.
"We missed each other," Little said. "When it was time to step on the football field, it's war. But at the end of the day, I'm still cool with those guys and have much respect for them."
Arnold undoubtedly will be tracked before, during and after Saturday's game, as many want to see how he interacts with Venables and others from his time at Oklahoma. But players and coaches who have been through transfer reunions say the trickiest part is the hours and minutes before kickoff.
"There's no one way that it goes down," Diaz said. "What I've found, more than anything is, once the game begins, the game becomes about the game, and everybody just sort of moves on."
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