Lundblade Happy to Be Back from Injury With a Game Under His Belt Before Bedlam

Wait, among all the elite skill players Oklahoma State possesses, could the Cowboys’ key to maintaining an elite offense actually be a former walk-on center?

It could be.

Brad Lundblade missed the Texas game with an injury, and Oklahoma State scored 13 points. He made it back for the West Virginia game, and Oklahoma State scored 50 points. Things are not that simple of course (he also missed Baylor and OSU scored 59), but maybe they’re not that much more complicated than that either.

“Before the year you guys asked me things I was concerned about,” said Mike Gundy before the WVU game. “You can go back on your notes. You all have these high-dollar computers.

“One was depth on the offensive line. That’s not a position where you can run guys in and out because it’s hard to keep continuity, the communication. What Brad Lundblade says and Larry gets it and Larry passes it to Crab and so on. You move a few guys around. They don’t talk the same. They don’t feel the same. When that happens, there’s a few issues. People outside don’t pay enough attention to what goes on there.”

I’m certainly paying attention now. As Adam Lunt pointed out earlier this week, Lundblade is the glue for a sometimes-overmatched OL. He holds the entire thing together, and without him the run game looked lost at UT.

The Pokes averaged just 2.9 yards per carry in Austin. That bounced back to 4.4 against WVU. It likely needs to be over 5 in Bedlam for the Cowboys to win.

“It has been tough. We’ve had so many injuries this year,” said Lundblade of his mates up front. “It’s been one guy goes out, then he gets back … a few weeks later I went out. I came back.

“So we’ve just been kind of moving around all year, and it’s hard but I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of fighting through that. That’s just football. Injuries happen and guys go down. You just have to continue to have young guys step up and fill those roles when guys go down.”

Lundblade said he was fighting to get back to be on the field with his guys again but also to get a game under his belt before Bedlam. It took him a full half in Morgantown to get comfortable again.

“Our training staff did a great job with me,” he said. “It was frustrating. It was the first time in my career I’d ever had to watch from the sidelines. It was really great to be back out there last week. I felt confident out there. They did a great job with me, and I felt good. In the first half, it took me a little while to get adjusted. I continued to gain confidence throughout the game as I kept pushing off that leg.

“For the last three or four weeks I’ve been in treatment twice a day. I was spending pretty much all my free time there. It’s hard to watch from the sidelines. All I wanted to do is get back out there with my teammates. Our training staff did a great job with me. It’s a little bit different when you’re hurt. The one job is to get healthy.”

Thankfully he is now, and the OSU offensive line is seemingly getting more whole as the season wears on (an anomaly to be sure). They have four of their five starts coming into the year as close to 100 percent as you could hope for going into November, and it’s a good thing too because they have a monster to deal with on Saturday.