Can Oklahoma State Go Back to the Deep Ball in 2025?

Mason Rudolph completed 138 passes 20 or more yards down the field in his Cowboy career. In the seven seasons since he left, Oklahoma State has combined to complete just 176 of such passes.

That included the fact that Rudolph played in only three games as a freshman in 2014. In his three full seasons as a starter, Rudolph averaged 42.3 completed deep balls a season; in the years since, OSU has completed an average of 25.1 of those passes a year. All these numbers are via Pro Football Focus.

Like many things, the deep ball hit a new low in Stillwater in 2024. Across the entire season, OSU was 12-for-59 on passes of 20 yards or more. Back to Rudolph’s three-game freshman year, he was 11-for-23 in those three games on those throws.

Let’s take a look at the Cowboys’ relationship with the long ball.

How Much Was Scheme?

A lot, might be the answer here.

In 2018, the year after Rudolph, Taylor Cornelius was 44-for-117 on deep balls. Mike Yurcich was the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator for the Rudolph years and that 2018 season with Cornelius running the show.

In the final four years of Yurcich’s tenure in Stillwater, the Cowboys averaged about 95 deep ball attempts a season. In one year under Gleeson and five under Kasey Dunn, the Cowboys attempted an average of about 70. OSU didn’t attempt fewer than 87 deep balls in the final four seasons under Yurcich. The only time they’ve sniffed that number since was in 2022 when OSU had 95 attempts. The next-most since Yurcich left was in 2023 when OSU quarterbacks heaved 70 passes downfield.

How Much Was Quarterback Play?

No matter which way you slice it, Rudolph is a Top 2 quarterback in program history (and to me, he ain’t No. 2), so there’s no shame in saying someone with that talent level would have better-looking numbers.

Cornelius actually completed more deep balls in 2018 (44) than Rudolph did in any single season (his most was 43 in 2016), but Rudolph’s completion percentages were much better, completing 47.5% of deep balls in his career to Cornelius’ 37.3% in 2018.

Cornelius and Yurcich exiting started the Spencer Sanders era of OSU football in 2019. Sanders was a good college quarterback, but he was obviously stylistically different than Rudolph. It makes sense that a dual-threat QB might not have as good of down-the-field numbers as a deep ball specialist like Rudolph.

Sanders’ mobility also led to injury issues throughout his career, which meant myriad backups got a good amount of run in his four seasons as a starter. From 2019 to 2022, quarterbacks not named Spencer Sanders (so, Dru Brown, Shane Illingworth, Ethan Bullock, Garret Rangel and Gunnar Gundy) combined to go 23-for-79 (29%) on balls thrown 20 or more yards downfield. It’s hard to be too critical on backups not having success on downfield throws.

The Cowboys’ 2023 season saw 70 downfield passes, with 62 of those coming off Alan Bowman’s hand. Bowman lost his starting gig toward the end of the 2024 season after going 8-for-47 (17%) on downfield throws — the fewest downfield completions any lead quarterback has had since the Rudolph era.

Outlook for 2025

Based on the combined zero pass attempts Zane Flores and Hauss Hejny have thrown in their college careers, this is a tough thing to project.

But, we can look at what some Doug Meacham-coordinated offenses have done in the past.

He last coordinated an offense at TCU in 2021. Led by quarterback Max Duggan, the Horned Frogs threw 74 deep balls that season — which is slightly more than the OSU average since Yurcich left, but not by a ton.

Before that, Meacham coordinated Kansas’ offense in 2017 and 2018. The Jayhawks threw 85 balls downfield in 2017 and 63 in 2018. So, that 2017 season was on-par with the Yurcich era of going long, but then 2018 featured fewer deep balls than all but this past season at OSU post Yurcich.

Here’s a chart of the past six Meacham-coordinated offenses as it pertains to the deep ball:

*Co-OC

Those Trevone Boykin TCU teams chunked the ball downfield.

Those six seasons come out to an average of about 85 downfield throws a year — a lot closer to the Yurcich era than what’s happened in Stillwater of late.