Eric Morris Took Early Steps to ‘Squash’ Natural Divisions within OSU’s Locker Room

The Cowboys may have both the Xs and Os and the Jimmys and Joes, but there is another very important ingredient for a successful football team: chemistry.

Some of Oklahoma State’s new stars shared the spotlight in Frisco this week at Big 12 Media Days. It was the first opportunity for media and fans to get some facetime with the new faces of Cowboy football.

As freshmen at North Texas last season, Drew Mestemaker led the nation in passing, and Caleb Hawkins scored more touchdowns than any other tailback in the FBS. But when it came to talking about this fall, they seemed more like seasoned vets ready to run it back than a pair of sophomores heading into a new locker room.

When asked about his prep this offseason, Mestemaker talked about OSU’s offense improving on “our weaknesses from last year.” Hawkins talked about “getting to see these new guys and especially the old guys coming back.”

With the huge Mean Green contingent that followed Eric Morris to Stillwater — both players and staff — it might be easy for these two to confuse OSU for North Texas 2.0, but I’m not sure these were slips of the tongue.

It’s also natural for players to group up with those they are comfortable with, but Morris knew he needed to do something drastic. He started his time in the job with a concerted effort to integrate all the incoming pieces with those returning to establish a new OSU. He touched on this point in an interview with WWLS from Media Days.

“It was very important for me the first month of two to make sure we didn’t have a North Texas crowd and Oklahoma State guys that stay crowd, and then all these guys funneling in and they’re going to pick which side,” Morris said. “That was really important for me to squash. The first team meeting [I] squashed it. … I looked up in the meeting, you know, North Texas kids are here, Oklahoma State here and I’m like before I even start this meeting, we’re not starting it off this way.

“I think trying to build everybody and bring them in together that ‘Hey this isn’t all these old teams, this is Oklahoma State ’26 team. We need everybody to come together, and winning footballs is freaking hard.'”

Mestemaker echoed that experience and said the whole team is bought in.

“In the first team meeting, Coach Morris made us sit next to someone we didn’t know, and you’re introducing yourself to everyone,” said Mestemaker. “You have a season to play in half a year, like eight months or whatever it was. The strides we’ve made in the past two to three months have been huge. Even since the start of spring, I think this team came together a lot, and we can be really special.”

Although he and his former Mean Green teammates are coming into a new situation, that culture under Morris helped direct Mestemaker and his teammates as they gel in Stillwater.

“Whatever we got to do to win,” said Mestemaker. “Even those guys who have been here and been through those not great seasons here at Oklahoma State, they’ve been here for a long time, so they’ve been a part of the great seasons at Oklahoma State, too. I feel like we have a lot of guys on our team who have played a lot of football and who have won a lot of games. I really do think that’ll help us once we get into the season in those tough games.”

We’ve listed all the reasons, on paper, that OSU could have success, but Morris knew the challenges that could arise from a bifurcated locker room as well as the step up in competition to the Big 12. For the new-look Pokes to live up to their potential, it had to be all hands-on-deck, as Cowboys.