TCU-Baylor Scheduling Not Working Favorably For Oklahoma State

Ah, the schedule. It is a wily animal. One week you could be facing Daxx Garman throwing moon balls. The next week you could be staring at a future NFL first-round pick playing his first game. It is a grab bag of absurdity every single year. I can’t complain much about this year’s slate because OSU hasn’t encountered many night road games and has only played once outside the states of Oklahoma and Kansas.

But one tweak could have changed the entire structure of the Big 12 title (and national title?) race. What if the TCU game had been back at the end of September and the Baylor game was this week for OSU?

Maybe OSU doesn’t beat TCU in September, but it’s certainly an easier task. And OSU would beat Baylor this week in Waco, in Saudi Arabia or on the moon with a freshman QB getting his first start and the Bears in full free fall mode.

“[TCU is] healthy again. We’re catching them at a bad time,” Glenn Spencer told the Oklahoman on Monday. “There was a stretch there where they weren’t very healthy. Think about us, you take away our top three playmakers, it’s not good. You’re going to take a hit.”

I don’t want to think about James Washington, Justice Hill and Zach Sinor missing any games much less the same one, but Spencer’s point remains. TCU was beat up at the end of September.

“They’ve got a couple of guys back,” added OSU safety Jordan Sterns. “They had that week off, but we do a good job of staying fresh. We’ve just got to come out and practice hard and keep doing the same things we’ve been doing. We’ve got to get properly prepared and then just go out there and do what we do.”

What TCU has done recently is beat Baylor into oblivion before getting a week to lay low. Bad news for OSU fans: Since joining the Big 12, TCU is 10-3 when coming off a bye week (77%) compared to 50-23 (69%) overall.

“There will be a few things that are different,” said head coach Mike Gundy of facing a TCU team coming off its bye. “You just have more time to study and prepare. Health-wise, fortunately for us, we’re in decent shape. We had our bye weeks a couple of weeks ago when we needed a bye week.

“I always have concerns when we play a team that has had a bye week if we’re not healthy. I think we’re okay there, but there will be some changes just based on the history of coaches who have time to watch tape and put things in that they can get in during the week. You have a Tuesday practice and a Wednesday practice and that’s pretty much it. The extra practices really help.”

You can’t make your own schedule, of course, and maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. But I sure would have liked to have played TCU in September when it was still reeling from its loss to Arkansas, finding its feet with Kenny Trill and not as healthy as it is now.