Mini-Mailbag: Could OSU be Better at Safety in 2017?

It’s mini-mailbag Friday today. As always we appreciate your questions via email, Facebook, Twitter and more. We might not always respond, but they’re informative and fun to think about and discuss/throw in a mailbag.

Mike Boynton is going after some dudes. Is he going to be the next Scott Drew? If you had to pick a current NCAA coach, who does Boynton Most remind you of? -Drew M.

Great question. Drew is a bit of an oddity. According to ESPN, Baylor had four straight top 25 classes from 2010-2013, but haven’t had a single one since then. I think the thing I love most about Boynton is that he’s taking swings at everybody. He doesn’t care. That’s one of the advantages of being young and green. You don’t know any better. You don’t care that OSU is not supposed to be an elite recruiting program. It doesn’t matter to you.

On the flip side, nobody has actually committed. It would appear as if OSU is on the verge of some monster catches, but I’d like to hold off until it actually happens. I don’t follow hoops recruiting as closely as Kyle Boone or Phillip Slavin so they would probably be better to ask in terms of a comparison, but I’ve been buying Boynton stock for the last few months (despite, or maybe because of his OSU fan survey results).

OSU fans always pride ourselves on being good at a lot of sports. With OU winning titles and going to Final 4s in softball/golf/bball/etc. and Stoops retiring, would you rather have OSU dominate the Big 12 in football for the next 15 years while all other sports suffer, or would you rather start winning titles in wrestling/golf/tennis etc while football stays good but not great? -Nolan C.

Good, not great. Just how Gundy likes it. This one is tough. Selfishly, I pick football. For the sake of this site and because I don’t pay as much attention to the other sports (three kids!) I don’t know. I guess it depends on how good. Is right now “good”? Because I’d take right now in football and win titles elsewhere, but if being “good” means falling back a rung or two on the CFB ladder, I think I’d have to pick football.

I got bored while avoiding mowing my lawn today and started thinking about what a perfect scenario to get us into the playoff would look like. Aside from the obvious, “beat nOu” or even “beat nOu twice!” what about the rest of the schedule? So I threw together a schedule in which each of our matchups (in conference) feature an opponent that’s winning. Here’s each opponents record when we meet followed by the overall Big 12 standings. I used an overall record from the dream world where we all nail the non-con schedule. I know it’s all far-fetched but interesting to me nonetheless. I thought maybe an article discussing these scenarios would interest other readers as well.

Sep 23- TCU (3-0)
Sep 30- Tech (3-0)
Oct 7- Bye Week
Oct 14- Baylor (4-1) only loss to nOu
Oct 21- Texas (5-1 OR 6-0) due to RRR
Oct 28- WVU (7-0) – scary right?
BEDLAM- (8-0 OR 7-1)
Nov 11- ISU (5-5) they get to beat Tech and TCU before we meet
Nov 18- K-St (7-3) only losses to Baylor, Texas, and nOu
Nov 25- KU (4-7) our first opponent with a losing record.

Leaving the conference with:
#1 OSU (12-0)
#2 Tex/ nOu (11-1)
#3 nOu/ Tex (10-2)
#4 K-State (8-4)
#5 WVU (8-4)
#6 Bay (7-5)
#7 ISU (6-6)
#8 Tech (5-7)
#9 TCU (4-8) Poor TCU, but at least they beat Kansas
#10 KU (4-8)

That’s also great for the conference. 7 of 10 bowl eligible.

Just my bored 2 cents. Time to go mow. -Glen W.

I’m here for all of that. So is Chip Brown.

Is this year’s safety team of Ramon/Flowers going to be better than last years of Flowers/Sterns?? Ramon could be an All Big 12 guy back there or this experiment could flop before September is over. Jon J.

This is a very insightful question/mental exercise. Ramon catches the brunt of our ire for whatever errors exist on the OSU defense. But the reality is that he was a starter and leader on an above average defensive team nationally and one of the better defenses in the Big 12.

He’s going to be helped by the move to safety, too. I don’t know if Flowers + Ramon is greater than Flowers + Sterns, but I think it at least warrants a little debate. What was Sterns great at? Taking Dede’s head off and always being around the ball. You’re going to lose a little of that no matter what this season, but you’re going to make up some takeaways from Ramon that Sterns just did not provide.

This might sound like a ludicrous question to some, but I think we’re going to look back on The Great Ramon Experiment of 2017 and think, “Man, Gundy might be smarter than his hair makes him look.”