Oklahoma State Athletic Director Chad Weiberg Talks Season Expectations on Big 12 Today

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It’s hard to know what expectations to have for the Cowboys in Eric Morris’ first year.

A question many have pondered this offseason is what is a successful Year 1 for Morris at Oklahoma State? On one hand, the Cowboys haven’t beaten an FBS team in more than 700 days. On the other hand, it’s an entirely new roster led by a group that had the nation’s most-potent offense last season.

OSU athletic director Chad Weiberg went on Big 12 Today on Thursday, where he was asked what a successful Year 1 looks like for the coach he hired.

“I don’t want to set any kind of cap on that,” Weiberg said. “I’m as excited as everybody else is to see what it’s gonna look like. Nowadays, it’s so hard to know for sure what we have on our roster, but what anybody else has on their roster. It is such a fluid situation.

“We’re gonna compete in I think every single game that we play. Like everything, you’ve gotta have the ball bounce your way a couple times and things like that, but I think it’s certainly fair to have the expectation that we’re gonna be bowl eligible. I think at this point, that is a minimum expectation that we’d like to get back into postseason competition, whatever that looks like. But that’s sorta the floor. I’m not ready to set any kind of cap on where we can go beyond that.”

The minimum being bowl eligibility is a credit to former OSU coach Mike Gundy and the standard he set in his 21-year tenure coaching the Pokes. In the 18-year stretch from 2006 to 2023, the Cowboys made a bowl every season. That’s what made the abrupt downturn of the program the past two years so shocking.

After clobbering Tulsa 45-10 on Sept. 14, 2024, the Cowboys have gone 0-20 against FBS teams and lost those games by a combined score of 759-351.

To add to the hardships, this nosedive came at a time when funding is as important as it’s ever been. It’s hard to expect people to empty their pockets for a team that got outscored by an average of about 20 points a game across a 20-game period.

With the additions of the offseason, there seems to be some more dollar bills circulating through the program. Weiberg was asked if the excitement of the hire has re-engaged the fanbase and boosters.

“Obviously the last couple years were really tough,” Weiberg said. “Any program that goes through that, it is tough. I think it was really tough for us because it had been so long since we’ve been through it. There’s an entire generation of OSU fans, at this point, who never experienced anything like that, which is a great thing and is a testament to Coach Gundy and what he did here with this program.

“But when you go through that, yeah, it had the impact that it’s gonna have anywhere, and I think our fans actually did a great job even through it. We still had really, really good crowds for most of the season last season. Even going through that, people were behind our players and wanting them to have success, but there is just a lot of excitement for this new era, right, and I think everything that comes with that from a donor standpoint, from a fan standpoint, ticket-buying, all of those things.”

Although it’s hard to know exactly what the Cowboys will look like this season, it certainly seems as if the team will be significantly better about putting points on the board. It’d be hard to be worse, as the Cowboys ranked 132nd nationally (of 134) last season in scoring offense, averaging just 14.2 points a game. OSU scored more than 20 points in just three games last season — the win against FCS UT-Martin, 27 against Baylor and 21 against Kansas.

From 2010 through 2017, the Cowboys had a Top 5 scoring offense four times and was in the Top 20 another three times. So, when OSU football was at its best, the scoreboard operator was getting a finger workout. It sounds like Weiberg is expecting some semblance of that to return in 2026.

“People are just excited to see what’s gonna happen,” Weiberg said. “We have a history here, it’s kind of our identity of scoring a lot of points. When Coach Gundy first took over the program, we scored a lot of points, and I think that’s what people are anticipating we are going to see here. That is part of our identity, so people are really excited about what that’s gonna look like.”