Camaraderie is Key: Cowboys Gelling Well Despite Myriad New Faces

STILLWATER — When the Cowboys were hitting shots on their way to a win against Kansas State on Tuesday, Steve Lutz apparently had to tell his bench to keeps its celebrations off the floor.

There was reason to celebrate, as Oklahoma State picked up its first Big 12 win of the season in a 79-66 final against the Wildcats. Having to tell a team to temper some celebrations is a good problem to have, especially when 10 scholarship players are new.

They came anywhere — from La Salle (Khalil Brantley) to Texas Tech (Robert Jennings II), from FIU (Arturo Dean) to Arkansas (Devo Davis), but Brantley said a common goal of winning is what this group is trying to stay focused on, leaving little room for selfishness.

“Sometimes everybody may not be having the game that they want or may not be making the shots that they want to make, but at the end of the day when you see that type of camaraderie, you know it can be something really good,” Khalil Brantley said. “In this game and the way that college basketball is going now, people can get really, really selfish and be so focused on their self and not the team. I feel like on this team, we care about each other.

“We want to win. Everybody, we all want to get to that tournament. I know I do. I know Rob (Jennings) does. But just to speak for the whole team, we all have that mindset that we want to prove the naysayers wrong. We all see that people, they still got us at the bottom, which is what it is, but at the end of the day, we know what we want and we know what we’re trying to get out of this season.”

There are 10 Cowboys playing double-digit minutes a game, also leaving little room for selfishness. Lutz’s group plays with tempo, making a bigger rotation more of a necessity, but Lutz deserves credit in constructing a roster of veterans (eight scholarship seniors) who are OK with sharing the floor.

Some of that comes from finding out who guys are in the recruiting process, but Lutz also facilitated team-building exercises in the offseason. Lutz on Thursday discussed how tough his practices are. He said he wants those to be tougher than the game, pushing guys to their breaking point so that a teammate has to help them through it, further building that camaraderie.

“You investigate people in the recruiting process and you ask a lot of questions,” Lutz said. “But really, recruiting a lot of times, it’s a very fickle deal. You can have everybody in the world tell you, ‘Hey, he’s great,’ and then he gets here and he’s delusional. I don’t know if you guys saw the rant that (UCLA coach) Mick Cronin had the other day. When you take all these transfers and stuff, no matter what they tell you in the recruiting process, they still have an idea of what they want to accomplish in their last year or what they want to accomplish in the next endeavor at the next school. It’s really hard and tough to navigate that, so my staff and I, we just invest an enormous amount of time into trying to make sure that it’s not fluff, that it’s real and that these guys are real.

“You start off 0-2, you’re sitting there looking around at them, and there’s some cracks in the armor. We’re not perfect. I’ll tell you that up front. But, you have to believe in humankind that you recruited the right people and that character is there, and that in the end, they’ll do the right things.”

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Opponent: Utah
Time: 6 p.m. (Central) on Saturday
Location: Salt Lake City
Watch: ESPN+