Mike Gundy on 4th Down OT Call: ‘There Really Wasn’t Any Decision’

Let’s chat about that fourth down call in overtime. It made me raise my eyebrows, for sure, but Gundy said the deed had already been done way before that failed Mason Rudolph bootleg on third down.

“We got to the fourth down and the yard or yard and a half, whatever it was, but there really wasn’t any decision,” Gundy said. “I guess there was a decision [but] I had already thought that through.

“As soon as the overtime starts I had in my mind what we wanted to do if we got to fourth down, and that was to go for it unless it was out of the realm. Because I just didn’t feel like that if we kicked a field goal on the road, the crowd would have gone crazy knowing that all they had to do [to win] was score, and momentum was already against us.”

It’s hard to know how I feel about the call. I wrote after the game that I liked it, but I think I was saying that simply because it worked. There wasn’t enough time to process how I felt about it in the moments before it happened to get a truer idea of how I felt about the call (because I didn’t know whether it would work).

“We trust J.W. We blocked the play well, and if we don’t … J.W. has a really good ability to slide sideways, turn his body and get a yard,” noted Gundy. He got a lot more than that.

“I just have a lot of confidence in him, and Mike [Yurcich] made a good play call, changed up the scheme. That’s the first time we’d run that blocking scheme out of that package in this game. It worked for us.”

Walsh was more blunt.

“It wasn’t as pretty as you’d want it to be but at the end of the game we made plays when we had to do it, and ran the ball,” said Walsh.

He’s right. And now OSU is 6-0 because of it.