How One Play Changes One Game Changes One Season for OSU

I fell asleep on Saturday evening thinking about one play from the Oklahoma State-Iowa State game. It’s not something I do very often anymore. Over time it has become easier to leave the games in the shed or in the press box and move on to Cincinnati.

That doesn’t mean I don’t love them of course, and it sometimes doesn’t mean that they don’t seep into my mind during my downtime or when I should otherwise be thinking about something else. So as I laid down on Saturday evening after watching a little Notre Dame-Virginia Tech and A&M-Kentucky, the play that kept rolling through my head was this one.

But before we talk about that one, we need to talk about a different one that happened 329 days earlier and 545 miles to the north.

Second and goal on the Oklahoma State 4-yard line with the Pokes up 49-42 over Iowa State in Ames. They had trailed for much of the second half with the season hanging on by a thread after what OU had done to them a week earlier. Iowa State should have scored. Instead, A.J. Green ripped an interception and the Cardiac Cowboys lived on to another 10-win season.

OSU was mediocre rushing the ball that day (3.9 yards a pop) and racked up nine penalties for 105 yards. Iowa State got seven first downs via penalty. Seven! But because OSU won, everything gets framed differently. The passing game overcame. The defense did enough. The Pokes are a great one-possession team.

“You come up short you start looking at things way more in detail than you do when you win,” said Mike Gundy on Saturday night after losing to Iowa State, 49-42. “It’s always been that way. There’s been times we’ve won games here and made mistakes. There’s not any overreaction here.”

It’s true that wins and losses make up the prism through which we see events. If one play goes differently on Saturday, all of a sudden the Cardiac Cowboys are back, Corndog is state fair-worthy and Tylan Wallace is already the goat. Oh sure the offensive line needs some work, but they’ll figure that out. They always do!

The play I’m talking about of course is this bomb from Cornelius to Tylan in the middle of the fourth quarter. If Tylan catches it, he probably scores to put OSU up 42-40. If he scores, a suddenly-sputtering Iowa State offense (they had scored three points in the previous five drives) would have gotten the ball deep in their own territory with a freshman QB needing a monster drive for the win. Given OSU’s history against third string freshmen QBs, he probably would have gotten it … but maybe he wouldn’t have.

I guess my point is that we all like to doom and gloom (or overhype) games like these, and push them into the far reaches of either end of the spectrum depending on the W-L column. There is a bigger picture question to be asked, for sure — is Oklahoma State better as a program than it was, say, seven years ago? — but regarding one game, I think it’s a little disingenuous to say the sky is falling.

Does this mean Oklahoma State is good? No, it doesn’t. But nobody thought last year’s team was bad (maybe underachieving but certainly not bad) and they played a handful of games just like this one. Instead we throw out stats like OSU is 15-3 in its last 18 games decided by less than 10 points and pretend like it’s a good thing that OSU is playing one-possession games against Iowa State.

So while the state of the program might need a ? or two, I think it’s good to look back to 2017 (and 2016 and 2015) when these games fell OSU’s way. Sure, maybe they did more to give themselves multiple opportunities to win games like these at the end (instead of just one), but let’s not act like OSU was just housing teams all over the country and now they’ve fallen off a cliff.

You’re going to have your one-off games (TCU in 2015, Texas Tech in 2018), but generally you’re going to play a lot of games that are tight late if you’re Oklahoma State. The margins have been thin for years in Stillwater — again, ?? — and losing a NFL QB is enough to flip you to the incorrect side of the knife’s edge.

Maybe we should have seen this coming because of that reality, and yes, the bigger questions are should the margins be so thin that when you downgrade at one position (or maybe two), the whole thing looks like it could come apart at the seams? Shouldn’t OSU be sturdier than that? Wait, how many one-possession games have they been in over the last few years?

That’s another post for another time, but I’m not quite ready to wave the white flag and say this is a 2014 redux. Maybe it is. That’s certainly on the table. And maybe all of those one-possession games that went their way in the Mason Rudolph era will all go the other way now and they’ll miss a bowl game. Maybe. Or maybe they’ll split them, and an 8-4 team this shall be. I have no idea — although I think I know how they could help their chances!

What I do know is that the rest of the season is going to be (at best!) just like this Iowa State game, and OSU can’t afford to miss on its handful of chances to take leads and win games late like they did on Saturday. Their margins have tightened once again, and anything resembling a positive season will hinge on how well they take advantage of those chances. That’s more or less always been the case (save 2011), and it will be once again over the final six games.