No Good Time for a Pandemic, but This One is Especially Unfortunate for OSU

The timing for a global pandemic to upend the world could not be worse for Oklahoma State.

Not that there’s ever a great time for a once-in-a-century event to strike, but this one is particularly rough for an athletic department that had just let the sails down on a new decade.

Every football and basketball season is important and meaningful, but the 2020-21 school year held particular promise for these Pokes. Mike Gundy somehow convinced two top-100 NFL Draft picks to return for another college season. Mike Boynton lured the best high school basketball player in the world (?) to Stillwater (and brought with him the best basketball player in Canada, too).

A football season that promises at least a run at some sort of championship. OSU will certainly be ranked in the top 25 going into the season with its best opportunity at a Big 12 title since the last year of the Rudolph era. This is not Ohio State where that’s true every year. For Oklahoma State it’s more like one time every three or four. This, unfortunately, being that one.

Hoops is poised to potentially sneak into a preseason top-25 poll also. That’s something that’s happened just one time in the last 15 years. It’s a season that would at worst be the most exciting of the Boynton era, and at best could be a facsimile of the Melo era at Syracuse (that we remember all too well).

Now? Well, now they’re both in flux, both up in the air, both being tossed to and fro by every data point and talking point on a daily basis. Now … two of the most promising seasons in Oklahoma State’s two most important sports almost certainly won’t happen on the timeline we envisioned when the year began, and there’s at least a chance they might not happen at all.

It would, of course, be the most Oklahoma State thing of all time to get the No. 1 basketball player in the land for the second time in a decade and a half and for those two players to combine for zero minutes in GIA. From an Oklahoma State perspective, you wouldn’t have minded if maybe 2018-19 was erased or maybe even 2019-20. But 2020-21? That one would hurt quite a bit.

There are obviously much bigger issues at hand than whether OSU gets to play 45 or 50 basketball and football games over the course of the next 11 months. That is so far down the totem pole, it’s difficult to even find. But in our world, it’s no small thing. In Oklahoma State world, this is a big deal. Not only for us as fans but for the university, the athletic department and for all the folks you never actually see on Saturday afternoons and Wednesday nights.

Because college sports are big business these days, more people are affected than ever before. When Cade Cunningham comes and Chuba Hubbard returns, that means more interest, success and opportunity within Oklahoma State. When Cade Cunningham and Chuba Hubbard are stymied by a pandemic, well, you already know what that might mean.

The vast majority of you think a 12-game football season gets underway either in September or October. This would imply that a basketball season would be played as scheduled, too. I’m with you, and heading into May I think I’m a little more hopeful.

The reverberations from this pandemic will be felt for years at levels way beyond college athletics and two of the most important seasons in recent OSU history. However, within our world these seasons are a bellwether for how felt or unfelt the pandemic actually is (I remember when the NBA shut it down, thinking, “Oh … wow, this is crazier than I thought”). And while two lost seasons would not be the most unfortunate thing to arise from this era, two lost seasons — especially these lost seasons — would be a marker for the way a lot of us remember one of the strangest years of our lives.