Gundy Credits ‘Different’ Homecoming Crowd With Energy That Propelled His Team

On a night when Oklahoma State’s football team was complete for three quarters, a lathered up crowd carried the Pokes home in the fourth. I’ve been to a lot of games at that place in my life, and this performance — from beginning to end — has to be near the top. I could not believe the fastball OSU’s fans were dealing all night, and they saved their best stuff for the very end.

I asked Mike Gundy why his team seemed so energetic against a 6-1 Texas team after coming out flat for the most part against Texas Tech, Iowa State and Kansas State. His response? The 56,000 in attendance.

“Hometown crowd. The crowd was fantastic, right? Tonight was unbelievable,” said Gundy. “You have 65,000 people here for walkaround. you have perfect weather. You have primetime television. Beautiful night. Everybody’s excited. Place is full. We started the game fast. So important, right? It just kept going and kept feeding itself and kept feeding itself.

“There’s no doubt the crowd was different tonight than it has been up to this point. It was different tonight, and I think it made a big difference with the players. I would like to say my Knute Rockne speeches are good enough to get ’em excited all the time, but I gotta have help.”

He had plenty of it on Saturday evening as orange and black filled the place to the brim from the jump. It probably helped that it was a 7 p.m. game. It probably helped that Texas was ranked No. 6. It probably helped that it was Homecoming. It probably helped that OSU hadn’t played in two weeks. But still, I didn’t expect to see that for a team that had just had its season dashed against the rocks in Manhattan one game ago. It was … kinda big time.

“That means a lot,” added cornerback A.J. Green. “The energy. You come out of the tunnel, you can feel the crowd. You feel the vibes in the air. Third downs, it gets loud in here. I like it. I think a lot of the energy came from them. Orange power had the stadium rocking.”

That it did, and to me it was a big reason that a team that has sometimes looked like it lacks a soul is no longer lacking a home Big 12 win. A fired up team rocking the GOAT jerseys in front of the GOAT running back got a stadium full of folks tipsy on fall weather and possibly a morbid curiosity about what was going to unfold in that stadium. They may not have gotten what they thought they came for, but they left full of something even better.