How many TDs would Barry Sanders have scored in 2013?

Photo Attribution: USATSI

Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of Oklahoma State’s second best football team ever and most of them (including Barry Sanders) will be in Stillwater on Saturday to celebrate the event.

Mike Gundy was asked about Sanders on Monday and he said he thought Sanders actually came up short of what his numbers could have been in an up-tempo offense.

“He’s the best college football player to ever play the game. You can say what you want. He ran up 37 touchdowns and however many yards back when we only had 65 plays a game. We weren’t even in high-tempo offenses and he very seldom played in fourth quarters.”

Gundy estimated that Sanders would have run for 75 touchdowns and 4,000 yards in today’s up-tempo offenses.

4,000 and 75, eh? That’s prodigious. That’s double what he actually got.

So let’s do some extrapolation. Let’s say Barry Sanders was the feature in Gundy’s fast-paced 2013 offense and kept the same averages he had in 1988.

1988 Sanders: 344 carries | 2,628 yards | 37 TDs | 7.6 YPC (this is without the bowl game, it didn’t count in 1988)

Oklahoma State ran just 803 plays that year, a shade under 67 a game.[1. This is tough because, like Gundy said, Sanders sat out most fourth quarters and Pat Jones dialed it down most of the time. But these are the only numbers we have to work with..] By comparison the 2013 team has already run 616, or 77 a game.

Sanders carried on 43% of OSU’s plays in 1988.

If you take OSU’s plays per game numbers this season out to the bowl game and he carried on 43% of them that would mean 429 rushes for him.

At his 1988 pace of 7.6 yards per carry and one TD every 9.29 carries his stats in 2013 would be as follows:

2013 Sanders: 429 carries | 3,256 yards | 46 TDs | 7.6 YPC

Not quite what Gundy predicted but still the craziest season — college, pro, peewee, or otherwise — in football history. What’s lost is probably how many balls he would have caught out of the backfield in this offense (Yurcich would have loved that). He caught 19 for 106 in ’88 so you can bet he would have caught 40+ in this O for a couple hundred more yards.

For fun…