Coaching Carousel a Reminder of Gundy’s Consistency

The coaching carousel has been active this year, and it’s impacted the Big 12.

The new-look league will feature two first-year coaches in 2024. The first is at Houston, where Willie Fritz (formerly of Tulane) fills in for a fired Dana Holgorsen. The second is a domino that fell with Nick Saban’s retirement. Alabama hired Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, and in response, Washington took Jedd Fisch from Arizona. Arizona, on Tuesday, reportedly hired Brent Brennan away from San Jose State.

So, I was interested in what the coaching landscape looks like in the Big 12 heading into the 2024 season, and when looking at the numbers, it’s another testament to the job Mike Gundy has done at Oklahoma State. Here is a look at the league’s 16 coaches sorted by winning percentage at their current school. Note: this only includes records at the FBS level.

So, among the league’s 16 coaches, Gundy is the leader in career wins, career win percentage, wins at current school and current school win percentage. Domination.

Gundy’s unfailing consistency is highlighted when you compare Gundy to a guy like Sonny Dykes. Dykes has been at TCU for two seasons. In one of those two seasons, Dykes led the Horned Frogs to the national title game, and despite that, he is still behind Gundy in win percentage at their current school because Gundy hasn’t had a year as poor as Dykes’ 5-7 2023 season since Gundy’s first year in 2005.

That’s not even to take anything away from Dykes. Leading TCU as far as he did in 2022 was remarkable. It just shows how solid Gundy’s time at OSU has been. Dykes is off to a hot start in Fort Worth despite the down second season, but he is 54 years old. Gundy is 56 years old. It’s hard to imagine Dykes tracking Gundy down on lists like this due to father time.

Then there’s guys like Dave Aranda and Matt Campbell — two names that a few short years ago were brought up any time a big job came open. In eight seasons at Iowa State, Campbell is 53-48. In his first eight seasons in Stillwater, Gundy was 67-35. Aranda led the Bears to a Big 12 title win over Gundy’s Cowboys, but outside of that 2021 season, Aranda is just 11-23 at Baylor.

The two Kansas school coaches would greatly benefit from their non-FBS resumes being included. Lance Leipold was a ridiculous 109-6 at Wisconsin-Whitewater, while Chris Klieman was 69-6 at North Dakota State. Leipold is in the midst of a rebuild that started much lower than what Gundy had to do in Stillwater. Klieman is on a similar projection to Gundy, going 39-24 in five years at Kansas State while Gundy was 36-27 in his first five years. But, K-State was in better shape coming off the Bill Snyder era than OSU was when Gundy took over.

The only comparison to make with Gundy in that list is Utah’s Kyle Whittingham, and the two have been mentioned in the same conversations before because of how long each has been at his current gig. Whittingham has won two Pac-12 titles to Gundy’s one Big 12 title, but Gundy has won a little more overall during their tenures.

With OU and Texas being the media powers that they are, Gundy probably didn’t get as much notoriety as he should have in the previous iteration of the Big 12, but when looking at this new-look league, there is no denying the program he has built.