How Oklahoma State Coach Mike Gundy Handles a Constantly Changing College Football World

Times, they are a changin’.

Mike Gundy has been leading the Oklahoma State football program for two decades. And that doesn’t count the four years he was the Cowboys’ quarterback. But Gundy has experienced more change in the last few years than he ever has during his time around college football.

Gundy has navigated OSU through four new eras of the Big 12. Half of those have come the last two years, including this upcoming season. When Gundy played, it would have been dirty to discuss him getting paid as the Cowboys’ QB. Even as a coach he’s had star players suspended just for having lunch with a former player. But now, Gundy gets phone calls from players’ agent who want more money thanks to NIL. When Gundy started coaching, a computer chose two teams to play for the national championship. Now a committee of people put together an entire set of rankings for a playoff. And we haven’t even gotten into all the changes just for 2024.

“Everything is new, and it’s kind of fascinating to me now,” Gundy said. “I’ve kind of gotten beyond all the new stuff. Now it’s fascinating for like, it’s what’s new. The issue, as we move forward and get into players actually being employees, the issue will be what do we do with the NCAA? Where do they stand? Because right now, they’re a nonfactor. What role will they play as we migrate toward, ultimately, an NFL model? Will they actually be a factor or not? That’s what’s really interesting.

“That was a long answer for now it kind of fascinates me to see what’s next. Nothing really surprises me anymore. We’re trying to stay ahead of the game a little bit, which is difficult to do because we don’t know what the parameters are yet.”

This 2024 season alone, the NCAA is implementing a 12-team playoff, two-minute warning, tablets on sidelines, direct communication with players on the field, an unlimited amount of coaches and possible roster rules that could erase walk-ons in college football.

“When we started last week, that’s the thing that I asked the staff and players to do [to not worry about possible changes],” Gundy said. “But up until then, yes, because we’re all running around trying to figure out what to do. How many coaches you gonna hire? Who’s in the press box? How you gonna get enough money to finance yourself through NIL? What kind of contracts you gonna have? Are they gonna be employees? Are they not gonna be employees?

“We all think we know what’s gonna happen, but we don’t know. The good news is over the next 5 ½ months, we can just play football. That is what I’ve asked the staff to do and the players to do, is get out of the realm of all this stuff that’s gone on and just play football through January. After that, we can get back into it.”

Gundy has been somewhat forced to change with college football. Always steadily, though. Once against leaving a program for a new one and referring to transfers as “snowflakes” in 2018, Gundy now frequently mentions having to look to the transfer portal for talent. Once a sin in this state, he even believes crossing Bedlam lines will become a normal occurrence, as OSU and OU have swapped players more than once the past few years. Oh, and speaking of change, Bedlam is no longer on the schedule either.

It has usually taken Gundy some time to respond to changes, though. He’s never leading the charge into a new era. But it might be because Gundy takes a more tortoise than hare approach. When the transfer portal was created, OSU was not at the top of any transfer class recruiting rankings. No player or recruit has made headlines for the bag they secured from OSU through NIL. When Gundy was recently allowed to add as many coaches to his staff as he wanted, he hired one — special teams coach Sean Snyder.

Mike Gundy, quite frankly, doesn’t react. He waits. He studies.

“You know, what’s interesting is, essentially, there’s no rules now,” Gundy said. “So there’s a lot of discussion. It’s funny in life when you see things and all of a sudden people say that now you can do whatever you want and there’s no rules; everybody starts dogpiling in all the different things that you want to do. So I think that we have to be a little careful to just all a sudden say that we want to hire 28 new coaches to coach football. Specifically, to be quite honest with you, at Oklahoma State, we’ve been pretty good at what we’re doing, so I’m not sure we need to change a lot of things.  …

“I’m going to watch and see how some of these other coaches handle these new rules. We have a good idea what we’re gonna do, which just means we’re not gonna change very much.”