Joel Klatt Includes Oklahoma State in Preseason Top 25, Josh Pate Teases Cowboys as Potential Playoff Buster

Let me take you back to the 2024 football season.

Coming off a Big 12 title game appearance the season before, Oklahoma State started 3-0 with wins against FCS power South Dakota State, Arkansas of the SEC and a blowout win in Tulsa after which Alan Bowman was named the National Player of the Week.

The Cowboys entered Big 12 play as the No. 14 team in the AP Poll, but then this nightmare that OSU fans have been put through started. OSU lost the next week in a weird game against Utah and fell to No. 20. Then the Pokes got hammered in Manhattan the next weekend and fell out of the poll. They haven’t been back since.

So, that’s the set up for this: Joel Klatt unveiled a Preseason Top 25 on Monday, and sitting there at No. 25 is OSU.

Thoughts on @joelklatt‘s Preseason Top 25? pic.twitter.com/P39EewUOCh

— The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football on FOX Pod (@JoelKlattShow) August 10, 2026

“How often do you see a team that went 1-11 start out in the Top 25?” Klatt said. “Welcome to the new, modern age of college football. Listen, I keep telling you guys that this is better than it used to be, and I kind of am proving it here. There’s so much turnover that you can immediately turn your fortune around, and I think Oklahoma State is gonna be able to do that. I really do.

“Mike Gundy, great coach. Great coach. Twenty-one years, so many 10-win seasons, a guy that I really, really respect and like a lot, but he’s out and now Eric Morris is in at Oklahoma State. Eric Morris comes in from North Texas. He led the No. 1 scoring offense in the country a year ago. Morris has worked with sort of a who’s who of quality offensive players in college football — Baker Mayfield, Patrick Mahomes, Cam Ward — in his career. So, you know he’s gonna get the most out of his quarterback. He did that a year ago with Drew Mestemaker, and now Drew Mestemaker is with him in Stillwater at Oklahoma State.

“I love this, completely different team. Fifty-five transfers, 17 of them from North Texas, including Mestemaker who led the country in passing. Caleb Hawkins, their running back, he led the country in rushing touchdowns as a freshman. Their slot receiver, a guy that I think is a really good player, Wyatt Young — third in the country in receiving yards last year. …

“I think that this is a really good football team that can turn it around quickly, remember, in a conference in the Big 12 where everyone’s kinda mashed together. So all of a sudden, you start winning some close games, and you can have a big bump in Year 1. I think that that might happen for Eric Morris there at Oklahoma State.”

It’s not an official poll, so we’ll still wait to see when that streak that started in 2024 is broken, but considering OSU went a combined 4-20 in the past two seasons, it’s remarkable to see the logo on such a list again.

From 2008 to 2024, OSU spent at least one week in the AP Top 25, something the orange-clad faithful probably started taking for granted given how tough the past two years have been.

That No. 25 ranking puts OSU behind four other Big 12 programs, with Klatt listing Texas Tech (No. 11), BYU (No. 14), Houston (No. 21) and Arizona (No. 24) ahead of the Cowboys entering the year. Oh, and OSU’s Week 2 opponent came in at No. 1 on Klatt’s list.

This comes after the Preseason Coaches Poll released last week and included the Cowboys in the “receiving votes” category. OSU would’ve been 37th in an expanded poll.

Pate, Again, Speaks Positively About Cowboys

Another national podcast also had some good things to say about the Cowboys.

On the Sunday episode of Josh Pate’s show, Pate introduced a game where you create a bubble of college football teams you think could be in the College Football Playoff. The winner of the game is whomever has all four teams in the semifinals while keeping their bubble the smallest.

When he started to get into the potential landmines of the College Football Playoff, Pate gave a little nod to the Cowboys.

“And then you get down to the step three of this whole process to me, which is you’ve gotta take a real, real fine-tooth comb, and you’ve gotta search for the chaos agents,” Pate said. “This is the kind of team that in the modern age of college football with how more evenly distributed the talent is, with how relatively inexperience the collection of players on a roster is, it kind of lends itself to an anything can happen. It’s like the Kevin Garnett Era of college football, and you gotta be careful that you don’t just skim over some of these teams and then come December find yourself saying, ‘I can’t believe that I didn’t look at that more closely.’

“Houston is one of those teams. I think Oklahoma State is one of those teams. Because think about yourself five years from now. In five years, is Drew Mestemaker starting on Sunday Night Football, leading a professional franchise and us looking and saying, ‘Man, you remember when he transferred with Morris up to Stillwater from North Texas. Man, if we knew then what we know now, we could’ve made a lot of money on Oklahoma State.’ Well, yeah, I’m trying to figure that out ahead of time.

“What if they’re the one that just goes full lightning in a bottle this year with all those transfers from North Texas? And what if Eric Morris ends up being one of, if not the best hires in Year 1 out of that entire hiring cycle. I’m on the fence about that.”