Oklahoma State Takes Long View on Path to CFB Greatness

The other day, my two-year-old son was standing on his step stool in the living room putting on a performance. He was reciting his Bible verses from church and unequivocally proud of his achievement. So much so that he did a little dance on top of the small stool and got all out of sorts before tumbling slowly to the wood floor, a heap of toddler-sized limbs and phalanges.

“You got out over your skis,” I told him. And he laughed even though he has no idea what the term means or really what in the world had just happened to him.

The path to the wealth sitting just inside college football’s upper crust is a long, arduous one that has been made that way by the blue-blooded programs which have seemingly existed as great programs since the last shot was fired in World War I.

There are shortcuts to the top of course, but barring the built-in advantage a school like Oregon has (Nike), the long view is figuring out how to create a path of sustainability when it comes to building a top 10 football program.

It takes decades (like, multiples of them), not years, to have an organization that surpasses what the OUs and Michigans and Alabamas of the world have already constructed. Might you be better than some of those schools once in a while? Absolutely. But I’m talking about sustained, long-term success. Programs.

So when Sports Illustrated came after Oklahoma State in 2013, I thought, we got too good too fast and now we’re going down. We got out over our skis.

But then I started looking at our rise in power and wondering if it was really all that impressive. Four wins in Mike Gundy’s first year. Single digits the next four. A couple of double-digits. Back to eight wins. Another double digit. Then seven (and it should have been five). It seemed as if OSU was grappling with what all programs clawing to the top grapple with … an inability to sustain excellence at the highest level.

OSU’s graph of wins actually made sense (more on that in a minute). You get a coach who knows what he’s doing, new facilities, a big boy booster, recruit decently and hey, you win a Big 12 title every once in a while. You go to some good bowl. You also have some bumps. You have down years.

After a 13-month investigation into the SI stuff took place, nothing was found. And this was an investigation that included accusations of sexual impropriety. Not sexual assault necessarily. But not nothing either.

The statement went on to say that despite going through 50,000 emails and interviewing 82 people involved with the program the the Enforcement Staff and an outside consultant couldn’t really find any major violations.

“While I am pleased, but not surprised, that the claims in Sports Illustrated were fundamentally unfounded, we continue to work with the athletics administration to ensure a clear understanding and application of our policies,” said Mike Gundy.

There were tweaks to be made (some of them bigger than others) and as Mike Holder noted, it was good for a third party to point them out. This is what you want to happen to a strong organization. For it to be made better. The whole thing, instead of being blown out of the water, actually made sense.

Which brings us to Baylor. Their win graph might make sense, but it also might not. This isn’t to say that all teams that rise quickly in the college football world are frauds or that such a thing is impossible. Only that it’s far more difficult than you might think, and when it happens as quickly as it did in Waco, it usually means something doesn’t add up.

That something for Baylor was a football operation that tried to toe the line of dishing out second chances to embattled kids and maintain a level of integrity within the program (or at least one that doesn’t promote a culture of rape). That’s a line you don’t want to have to walk when the rewards are more difficult to resists than the risks are to dispose. It’s a line Mike Gundy has rarely even engaged.

I don’t believe Art Briles didn’t want to help youth embroiled in first chances gone wrong. I just believe that to interact with that choice is to invite a whole host of problems no amount of bowl wins or Big 12 titles can appease.

And speaking of wins. Here is a chart. This is what it looks like to be a great recruiter, have a badass offense and take chances on playmakers nobody else would risk it all for. Baylor’s lagging three-year win average surpassed that of Oklahoma State by 2013 (Briles took over in 2008) and that of OU (!) by 2014.

Oklahoma State’s lagging three-year average win total on the other hand is more what you would expect from a plucky upstart. A nice steady rise, but not quite as steep as Baylor’s and dips all over the place once the mountain had been crested. Baylor’s was (is?) not headed that way at all based on its recruiting classes.

OU’s predictably is what you would expect OU’s to look like. Elite and consistently elite.

Look, Baylor did not win 11 games a year because it put a bunch of rapists on scholarship who could run 4.2 40s and bench 900 lbs. That’s a foolish thing to think. But to hit diamonds, you have to take chances[1. This is what the RG3 shirt should have said, yes?] (often character chances) which it was clearly willing to do despite evidence throughout sports history that it’s not really worth it from the perspective of your program. Out over their skis.

These are risks Gundy has chosen to not take which means his recruiting classes are worse and his teams not as consistently great as those of other, new-money squads.

“If I go recruiting and I’m in the school or in the home and I can tell the guy we are recruiting is disrespectful to his mom or a coach or somebody, then we’re off him because if he’s done that, he’ll never make it here,” said Gundy. “There’s no reason to bring him in here, it won’t be good for him or us.”

And look, I’m not naive enough to think that rape doesn’t happen in Stillwater or that all of OSU’s rehabilitation projects go swimmingly. But I do think we now know enough after the SI investigation (by the NCAA, not SI) to know that there doesn’t appear to be a systemic culture of malevolence like we’re seeing unfold at Baylor. Like we saw unfold at Penn State. Does that mean such a thing could possibly never exist? Absolutely not.

But I don’t think Mike & Mike take lightly what Boone Pickens said when he started handing over his bank account pin number one digit at a time.

“Mr. Pickens has always been very clear on this — that he will always help Oklahoma State unless we cheat,” Gundy said back in 2011. “You can’t build a consistent, winning program when you have setbacks (related to NCAA sanctions).”

“This is the first time we’ve committed the resources necessary to win in football,” Holder added when he first took over back in the mid 2000s. “We won’t cut corners and try to cheat to win. The only thing that could derail us from eventual success in football is if we break the rules. We don’t need to cheat, and we’re not going to cheat.”

Baylor didn’t cheat of course. It did something far worse than that. As David Ubben noted, that power can be a drug too strong for anyone’s self discipline.

So the point for me is not that Baylor did things “the wrong way” and that OSU did them “the right way.” Large organizations of people are far too nuanced to boil it down to saying “Baylor is evil” and “OSU is not.”

The point for me is that if OSU has to go through some seven-win seasons or gasp, even a four-win season to maintain a program that shuns the dripping allure of absolute power in America’s second-most popular sport, then so be it. I’m fine with that. Those bad campaigns make us appreciate the great ones even more anyway.