2018 OSU Team Testing What We Think We Know About Gundy-Coached Squads

We are 11 games in. Forty-four quarters down, eight to go. And I honestly feel less confident in what I believe about this 2018 Oklahoma State football team than I did on August 1.

This season makes no sense. Not because the Cowboys have beaten two top-10 teams and took another to the wire, but rather because they’ve upended what we thought we believed about Mike Gundy-coached teams.

Gundy has built a career (and a large home in Stillwater) out of building a program up to a specific level and beating the teams he should beat that reside below that level. Contrary to what many of you believe, one of the things OSU has been best at over the years is defeating teams it is favored against.

Since 2005 (including this season), OSU has won over 8 out of every 10 games (or 83 percent) it has played as the favorite. Compare that to Kansas State (85 percent) and TCU (83 percent) and you can see that OSU is on par with teams that we see as more consistent. The teams like Kansas State that “never lose those kinds of games.”

Conversely OSU doesn’t win a large number of games it shouldn’t win. The Pokes have won just 34 percent of games as the underdog in the Gundy era. Compare this to, say, OU which has won 48 percent of its games as the underdog over the same period of time (three of which have come against Oklahoma State).

Anyway, all of that has flipped in 2018, and I don’t really understand why. OSU has won three of its four games as the underdog this year (Boise, Texas, OU, West Virginia) but has lost four of its seven as the favorite. I mean, look at these numbers. They are all kinds of confusing.

I floated earlier in the year that when you don’t recruit well, QB play can make all the difference (for better or worse). Maybe what we’re seeing is a season in which OSU played poor teams in the first half of their slate and the better ones in the second half (three of the top four teams in the Big 12 right now came after OSU’s bye week), and maybe it’s just a matter of a season split by mediocre QB play in the first half of the year and then good QB play in the second. Maybe that’s all it is.

But they’ve gotten great QB play before and still fell to teams that were better than them. It just doesn’t add up. I don’t get it. This season has turned into one that doesn’t really fit the mold of what I thought was true of both Gundy and his teams: That they’re good enough to take care of business and average top three or top four finishes in the Big 12 but not really good enough to challenge for Big 12 titles without elite QB play for an entire year. This year they’ve been good enough to challenge for Big 12 titles but not good enough to average a top three or four finish in the Big 12.

There are a million other factors at play here, too. Maybe the way OSU played in the first half of the year affected some of the lines Vegas made on their games. Texas and OU lines are always skewed anyway because everybody loves betting on them. Maybe West Virginia, Texas and OU just aren’t very good, historically speaking, in the Big 12. Who knows! I don’t!

All I do know is that I don’t know anything, and what I thought I’d figured out after watching 14 years of Mike Gundy-coached teams might be out the window. Maybe we can tally this season up to a one-off oddity, maybe not. We probably won’t know for a few years. But as always, most of the fun is in trying to figure out what the heck we’re watching and how it got that way to begin with.