Other Than The Game, What Did Oklahoma State Actually Lose Against Central Michigan?

As I watched Jordan Sterns talk on Saturday afternoon about how OSU still has all of its goals intact, my first thought was, man, poor dude took one too many hits in that Central Michigan game. But then I started thinking about it a little bit more and started laying out the rest of the year, and realized Sterns is kind of right. The loss to Central Michigan on Saturday, while devastating beyond beliefe in the heat of the moment, means absolutely nothing for this Oklahoma State team in this season.

Here’s why.

When you look at stuff like this, you always have to go back to what your goals are. What are OSU’s goals? There are two:

1. Play for a Big 12 title.

2. Play for a national title.

Can it still accomplish both of those in 2016? Absolutely. I realize both sound absurd after watching OSU play like it did against Central Michigan (!), but that’s not the point. The point is that, like OU in Week 1, OSU functionally lost nothing in regards to long-term 2016 football goals. In fact, it probably lost less than OU did even though OU got beat by a top 15 team.

Let’s take the Big 12 piece of this first because it is the most obvious. This tweet got a lot of traction after I sent it out last Sunday, but it wasn’t *actually* true (#bloglyfe).

Big 12 standings after Week 1:

T1. Oklahoma State
T1. Baylor
T1. TCU
T1. Texas
T1. WVU
T1. Kansas
T1. Tech
T8. Iowa State
T8. KSU
T8. OU

?

— Pistols Firing (@pistolsguys) September 5, 2016

The reality on September 12 is that there are no Big 12 standings until there are Big 12 games. If you win all nine (or in the case of the last five champions, eight of nine) Big 12 games, then you’re the Big 12 champion. This is as true for 1-1 OSU as it is for 2-0 Texas. The Big 12 title can still be won by any team and all are starting on an even 0-0 playing field (well except Kansas).

The national championship side of things is more interesting, and it’s a little more debatable. Here’s my case. OSU was probably always going to have to go 12-0 to play for the national championship, right? Win them all, and you’re in. So what if it goes 11-1 now and its only loss is a game it didn’t really lose? Does the CFP committee really not take that into consideration? This is the upshot of having a human committee in this case. Computers see this loss as a loss. Humans see it as an asterisk in the shape of a mullet.

This is also why OU’s loss in Week 1 might be more crushing to its CFP chances than OSU’s was. OU fans will (correctly) argue that OU has to do less than OSU to get into the CFP. But OU was routed. That’s a black mark on your CFP resume. OSU’s is a “sort of gray but might have been written with disappearing ink” mark.

If you think I’m insane for talking about the College Football Playoff, I would like to point you to Ohio State’s 35-21 loss at home to Virginia Tech in Week 2 of the 2014 season. That VT team went 7-6. tOSU won 13 straight and Urban Meyer held a crystal ball in Dallas, Texas in early January 2015. That’s the template.

Some have pointed out that OSU’s postseason standing (and thus financial windfall) will be affected by an extra loss. Also not true. First, bowl games are determined largely on where you finish in the Big 12 standings, and a single loss (especially one like this) is not going to affect OSU’s selection process one way or the other.

That is, a selection committee is going to have the same level of desire to take an OSU team regardless if it is 8-4 (with a loss to CMU) or 9-3 (with a win over CMU). A bowl selection committee is going to give more weight to how you travel and what the bowl matchup is than if you lost a single non-conference game on a blown call.

The other part is that the way I understand it is that all Big 12 bowl money is redistributed evenly (this is not the same model all conferences use). So even if it would have gone to a different future bowl game, that outcome won’t negatively affect OSU from a financial perspective.

A a sidebar: if every conference was solely concerned about revenue generation, it would predetermine all but two of its team to forfeit all of their conference games and let two teams playing in the final weekend go 11-0 and then hope they both got into the College Football Playoff because the conference would then redistribute all that money evenly (college football in 2016, ladies and gentlemen!)

In a way, this could actually be a galvanizing loss OSU needed. If it had beaten CMU and then played against Pitt, Texas and Baylor like it did against CMU, it would have been 2-3 faster than you can say “Barry J. isn’t really a junior!” It seems as if this team has been a bit aloof in games so far this year. Which is an odd thing. But maybe this game will snap everything back to reality. Maybe this loss really will bring everyone together like Mason Rudolph noted on Saturday afternoon.

Of course none of this matters at all if OSU continues to play like it did on Saturday. OSU will just go 7-5, play in the Cactus Bowl and celebrate some three-star recruits in February. Then we’ll do it all again next year. But I think this team is much better than that. I’ve thought all along this team had a chance to be special.

The great part is that if you also believe that then not much has changed since last Monday. Last Monday we all would have said that sitting here on this Monday OSU would get into the College Football Playoff if it wins the rest of its games. That’s likely still true (barring four teams going 12-0 which won’t happen). We knew last Monday OSU would win a Big 12 title if it won the rest of its games starting this Monday. That’s definitely still true. That Hail Mary pitch-back play was a dagger, but it wasn’t a death knell. Not even close.

There are issues in Stillwater, to be sure, but the “1” in the loss column right not is not necessarily one of them.