Column: John Mateer Isn't the First Oklahoma QB Victimized by a Random Internet Attack

Bryan Aguada — if that’s even a real person — isn’t the first rando from the dark corners of the Internet to come after an Oklahoma quarterback with wild, unsubstantiated accusations. And John Mateer isn't OU's first such victim.

The last one — a University of Texas IT employee and Nebraska Cornhuskers fan — lobbed his own personal grenade at the Sooners way back in 2008.

At Sam Bradford and Landry Jones.

He posted a link to what looked like a legitimate news story from The Oklahoman reporting that Bradford and Jones had been arrested for cocaine trafficking.

His real name is James W. Conradt, although he was much more renowned then for his online persona of Darth Husker, which he perpetuated to some level of popularity on a Nebraska football message board.

On July 9, 2008 — five months before Bradford would go on to win OU’s fifth Heisman Trophy, and just one month after Jones arrived on campus as a fresh-faced true freshman from New Mexico — Conradt became Internet infamous within Sooner Nation.

He supposedly used the same tech skills that landed him a job on the University of Texas campus as a computing services manager in the IT department to lift a publishing template from The Oklahoman’s website, then simply filled in the blanks. (The most recent information available shows he still works for UT today as a Senior Business Analyst and still lives in Austin.)

Bradford, coming off a record-setting Freshman All-America season in 2007, was getting ready to set college football record books ablaze with his unforgettable 2008 campaign. Bradford grew up in Oklahoma City the son of a Sooner offensive lineman, but he was often reserved with the media and quiet and often shy in public spaces. Despite his dad’s history with the program and even his own year of intense scrutiny as the Oklahoma quarterback, Bradford definitely did not see this coming.

Jones was fresh off the high plains of New Mexico. Artesia is situated roughly equidistant from world famous landmarks like Roswell, Carlsbad Caverns and Alamogordo, and even though he was a two-time state champ and two-time All-State quarterback in high school, the devoutly religious Jones was only one month into his life as a Sooner — and he was absolutely not ready for this kind of blindside blitz.

The story was quickly picked up by two sports radio stations in Texas, which reported it as fact.

“Wow,” radio listeners in the Lone Star State must have thought, “history repeats itself at Oklahoma. All we need to see now is two guys in orange jumpsuits on the cover of Sports Illustrated.”

The post itself went away immediately when The Oklahoman tracked down Conradt and threatened legal action for slanderously misrepresenting the paper’s brand — and when Jones’ dad, Kevin Jones, promised to “prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law; I’ve got deep enough pockets to do it.”

Conradt took down his post and then told Berry Tramel the next day that he was very sorry.

“I want to express my deepest apologies to the families,” Conradt said. “That’s the thing I’m regretful about. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

A couple weeks later, media descended on Kansas City for Big 12 Media Day and asked Bob Stoops about it.

“It’s sad, the whole incident with our players,” Stoops said. “I read the guy’s comment — he didn’t mean to hurt anybody. Well, what did you think would happen? You sit there — and that’s two young guys that are as good of young men as you’ll ever find. Virtually straight-A students and do everything you ask of them and someone just puts that out there. It’s grown, mature people.

“It’s amazing to me, to be honest with you. And I find it just as humorous, though, that people actually read it and believe it. I don’t know what to say about it. It just surprises me that it gets that much attention or that somebody would actually then go ahead and report it as true as well without researching it.”

When he gets it going, Stoops has a great laugh. It’s sort of an off-key chuckle, surprisingly high-pitched but hardy and 100 percent authentic.

And he had it going later on that day with a small group of Oklahoma writers.

“Oh, we knew it was bogus right away,” Stoops said between the laughter. “Sam? Come on. And then Landry, too? Are you kiddin’ me?”

Which brings us to the present, where a “Bryan Aguada” this week accused Mateer of having wagered on college sporting events back in 2022, when he was a freshman at Washington State.

Rather than hide behind an anonymous pseudonym like Darth Husker and steal a template from a respected news organization to post on some message board, this generation’s attacker of OU quarterbacks simply logged into the Twitter account he created in 2023 — in which he claims in the bio that he works for Deadspin and something called Valley News Live (it’s based in Fargo, ND, and people there told KREF’s Blake Gamble they have no one by that name), and actually lifted the headshot of a minor league hockey player from 2017 to use as his profile pic (which Gamble also uncovered).

The profile pic for @Bryan_Aguada is actually of '16-17 Northeastern hockey player Zach Aston-Reese.

Just spoke w/ the Office Manager of @ValleyNewsLive who looked through their records. They have never employed either person.

Mateer is Innocent. Case Closed.#Sooners #CFB https://t.co/4tvrw0LXMM pic.twitter.com/swzMniiAA1
— Blake Gamble (@Blakes_Takes) August 12, 2025

A direct message request for comment from “Aguada” has gone unanswered. There are actually strong indications on that timeline that this person also has some level of fan allegiance to the University of Texas. Also, attempts to reach Conradt via social media were unsuccessful.

Now, unlike Darth Husker’s ridiculous post a generation ago, the tweet by “Aguada” does contain at least a kernel of truth.

The screenshots that were posted do reflect Mateer’s actual Venmo account, which he used for online transactions. Mateer has since made those transactions private (which begs the question: why have them public in the first place?)

But, according to a statement Monday from Mateer, the “sports gambling” memos at the bottom of two entries were “inside jokes between me and my friends. I have never bet on sports. … I can assure my teammates, coaches, and officials at the NCAA that I have not engaged in any sports gambling.”

OU followed that with a separate statement that said, in part, "OU Athletics is unaware of any NCAA investigation and has no reason to believe there is one pending."

Mateer was 4 years old when Darth Husker went after Bradford and Jones.

Maybe it’ll be years down the road, but somewhere, sometime, some anonymous keyboard commando — statistically speaking, very likely a Texas fan (or a UT employee or at least an Austin resident) — will use whatever iteration of the Internet that college football fans follow in the future to post some absurd accusation about Oklahoma’s quarterback.

You can bet on it.