The Big 12 Looks Different, and Gundy is Now an Elder Statesman

Three years ago. That’s not that long. It’s less than 1,100 days. Thirty-six measly months ago, Art Briles was the coach at Baylor, Bob Stoops was the coach at OU, Paul Rhoads was the coach at Iowa State, Charlie Strong was the coach at Texas and Charlie Weis was the coach at Kansas. Now, all those schools have different leading men with a combined five wins at their current schools.

And the big three — Baylor, OU and Texas (which have won or shared 12 of the last 13) Big 12 titles — have coaches who have a collective 0 wins at those schools. That’s astonishing, but it also points to something else: In a year when change has suddenly become en vogue, Oklahoma State now has maybe the best, most proven coach in the entire conference in Mike Gundy (he and Bill Snyder are the only two coaches in the league with outright Big 12 titles).

This year begins an era of transition with the announcement of Bob Stoops’ retirement as the Texas and OU coaches’ combined age is less than Snyder’s. The Red River Rivalry will look different. Bedlam will look different. Baylor-TCU will look different. The whole thing is unrecognizable from three years ago.

The last time the Texas-Oklahoma football game had 1st-year coaches for both schools was 1947: Blair Cherry for Texas; Bud Wilkinson for OU.

— Brad Townsend (@townbrad) June 7, 2017

Here is a look at the coaching turnover in the last three years at all 10 Big 12 schools including wins at current school by each coach. It should be noted that Patterson and Gundy are two of the three longest-tenured CFB coaches at the same school (and Snyder would lead that by a wide margin if he didn’t retire for a few years in the mid-2000s).

One crazy aside: Of the 10 current head coaches in the Big 12, seven (!) are at the only place they’ve ever been a head coach (and the other three have a combined 3 wins at their current schools). Wild.

All of this appears to mildly tilt the short-term scales towards Oklahoma State, Kansas State, West Virginia and Texas. We know what we’re getting with the first three, and Herman has at least done this at a pretty high level at a pretty mediocre school. With Lincoln Riley, we think we know — Stoops thinks he knows — but the reality of a 33-year-old taking over in Norman is pretty incredible. Maybe he’ll be awesome (with Baker Mayfield this year, he probably will), but that’s not even close to a sure thing.

The Big 12 is going to be volatile for the next few years until we figure out what we have with Herman and Riley. Will OU still be really good in 2017? Probably, but I think everyone is sort of underrating how good Stoops was and how difficult it is to steer that ship. Dan Wetzel wrote about this for Yahoo and what the big picture looks like for the Big 12.

Which, after Wednesday’s surprise retirement by Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops, means it may not be an overstatement to say the future of the league rests in the hands of two coaches who have never led a team at the Power Five level. Neither man owes anything to anyone other than their players and their school, but the stakes for college football are considerable.

The league’s other members can have, and have had, great success. Everyone knows however that the league needs its national brands, Texas and Oklahoma, to serve as the glue for both membership and the collective ability to generate hundreds of millions in revenue. That’s just the reality of business – no matter how strong TCU or Oklahoma State or Baylor has been on the field. [Yahoo]

Now I don’t care as much about the big picture for the Big 12 as I do about how it affects Oklahoma State, but his point remains. There is a lot of unknown in the league right now which is great for Mike Gundy and Co. Or at least it is right now. You’ll take a known commodity at the level OSU has been producing at over an unknown any day of the week. Maybe Herman and Riley will crush and Oklahoma State’s position as the No. 2 power in the conference will be in jeopardy. Maybe they’ll move to No. 3 instead of No. 1.

Or maybe Snyder will retire, Holgorsen, Kingsbury and Patterson will keep pumping 7- 8- and 9-win seasons, and Riley and Herman will flail. And Oklahoma State will run the league for the next five years. It’s at least in the realm of possibility which is not something you could say this time yesterday.