Is Oklahoma State’s Season Back on Track after the Cowboys’ Win in Ames?

This is shaping up to be a classic Oklahoma State football season, meaning nothing makes sense.

The Cowboys traveled to Ames on Saturday and topped a ranked Iowa State 34-27. OSU did so after a horrendous offensive outing in Lubbock and getting drilled at home against Baylor. It would be easy to say after those two performances that things weren’t looking great, but this victory kind of puts OSU back where everyone thought it would be.

OSU was supposed to win its three nonconference games, and it did. The Cowboys were supposed to lose to Texas, and they did. But things got a little interesting after that.

Before the year started, many saw Mike Gundy’s team winning its game against Texas Tech with Matt Wells in his first year, but that didn’t happen (-1). The Baylor game was probably thought to be a toss up entering the year, and going into the fourth quarter, that’s what it was.

The Cyclones had a lot of preseason hype this season, and many thought Iowa State would be a Top 3 team in the Big 12. OSU wasn’t supposed to win in Ames, and here we are (+1).

So, the Cowboys are 5-3 at a point in the season where 5-3 was a solid possibility. It’s just, in classic OSU fashion, the route there was quite unconventional.

Details within those games, the three losses in particular, have made it made it seem probably worse that it actually was. A five-turnover game from a freshman quarterback and a 21-7 fourth quarter are solid reasons for concern, but on the macro level, those losses count just as much as the Texas game where the Cowboys looked as good as a young team could in defeat.

A 5-3 record isn’t what OSU fans want, and it doesn’t feel like it’s where the Cowboys should be at this point in the program’s history. But when projecting where the Pokes should be at this point in the season, it doesn’t seem all that unfair.

Going forward, the Cowboys still have Kansas and West Virginia to play. Both of those should be OSU wins, but again, who knows? The TCU game gets a lot more interesting with the Horned Frogs beating Texas on Saturday.

So, it’s shaping up to look like OSU will enter the Bedlam game at either 8-3 or 7-4 (given how things have gone as of late, OSU will probably beat TCU just to lose to West Virginia). Then as last season proved, just about anything can happen in Bedlam.