McCleskey Situation Underlines Challenge of Running a CFB Program

If ever you thought you could run a tighter college football ship than Mike Gundy, or theorized you could coach a better game or call better plays from his post on the south sideline of Boone Pickens Stadium, then your postulation would be extremely misinformed.

Not because sporting a mullet or making vodka-smoothie jokes are necessarily challenging tasks, to be clear, but because those are the lighthearted aspects of a job that, by nature, is often intricate and fractious.

So much of what fans, and sometimes the media, feel that all coaches do centers around what takes place during a four-to-five hour window on Saturdays during football season. We see Mike Gundy, we see a mullet, and we can’t figure out exactly why the two added up don’t equate to an elite offensive gameplan against Texas Tech. Or we rue his lack of success against OU, for example, because recruiting isn’t at the level we suspect it should be.

Those are hard fixes in themselves. Those are also largely public battles, playing out in the media and on the field for fans across the country to see.

Privately, however, is where coaches earn their monstrous salaries. Winning 10 games helps, sure, and if we’re being honest, it prevents you from losing your job or from dealing with an angsty fanbase. The job itself is far more complex than that.

Sometimes Mike Gundy uses words like “culture” and “unselfish” as often as he combs his hands through his locks on gameday. On Monday, as he announced Jalen McCleskey had chosen to redshirt the 2018 season and transfer, all I could ponder were those words.

They are the oft-used public buzz words in coaching that make the job, privately, so challenging.

Gundy does, and has seemingly always done, a fantastic job of managing situations behind the scenes. It’s rare to see players transfer from OSU. The Cowboy Culture, the much-discussed glue that holds the program together, seeps into talking points by players. It feels like it means something.

That this happened on a random Monday both speaks to some unforeseen fallout with the new redshirt rule and shines a light on what a rarity it is at a place like Oklahoma State. That we’re all taken aback by it further proves why Gundy is so good at his job; these types of midseason distractions are far from the norm.

Monday’s developments are proof that running a college football program, managing 100+ players, roughly 80 of which are on scholarship and (probably) more than 60 percent of which were the best player at their own school, is a next-to-impossible task to maneuver without stepping on landmines. It only takes one player to decide his role isn’t satisfactory to turn things around.

Take Gundy’s quote about the decision, for instance.

“He did not feel good about us getting the ball to him, so he’s decided to redshirt and transfer. We’re going to let him sit for the rest of the year. That decision was made this morning.”

How can Gundy control that, exactly? (Spoiler: he can’t, and he shouldn’t.)

He more or less answered that question later in his presser.

“He had mentioned it earlier, but you look at it from my standpoint: We can’t control who touches the ball all the time, especially at the wide receiver position,” Gundy said. “We’re certainly not going to tell our quarterback, ‘We want you to throw to this guy’ for certain reasons. He didn’t ask us to do that, but that’s what you’d be doing.”

So sure, Mike Gundy might have it easy at OSU. He can retire in Stillwater as the winningest coach in program history, for crying out loud. And this is the golden era of OSU football.

But Monday’s developments underscore that, despite the perception that all Gundy does is talk into his headset, show up for media appearances, make jokes and cash checks, he does far more behind the scenes. Because, culture be damned, running a college football program is an onerous task. At OSU. Or Bama. Or anywhere else in the country.