Oklahoma State Has Been Amazing Against the Spread this Decade

I was researching something this week for the Oklahoma State-Texas game this weekend when I came across an interesting stat related to point spreads. Since 2010, only two Power 5 teams have covered more than 59 percent of point spreads. Those teams are as follows.

• Stanford: 61.2 percent
• Oklahoma State: 59.7 percent

The Pokes have (barely) covered all three already this season.

• Oregon State: Favored by 13.5 | Won by 16
• McNeese: Favored by 41.5 | Won by 42
• Tulsa: Favored by 14 | Won by 19

The (very) rough math on this is that if you would have bet $100,000 on OSU to cover every game since the start of the 2010 season, you would be sitting pretty in 2019 with well over $2 million.

This week’s line on the OSU-Texas game is down to Texas by 5 points after it opened at nearly 10 earlier this summer. It goes deeper with the Pokes though. They’ve been strong as a road underdog this decade.

Mike Gundy’s teams have gone on the road 14 times as underdogs over the last 10 years and they’re 9-5 against the spread over that period of time. Their average margin of point spread coverage is 5.2 points (WHICH IS A TIMELY NUMBER SINCE THE SPREAD THIS WEEKEND IS 5!)

Interestingly, the last two times OSU has gone to Texas — two games in which it stole victory — it has been favored. By a TD in 2017 during maybe the worst college football game I’ve ever seen and by a field goal in 2015 when OSU won 30-27 because Texas’ punter couldn’t hold on to the rock.

I have no idea what to do with any of this information — maybe the takeaway is that I could get lost (and have gotten lost) on teamrankings.com forever — but I do think it matters that OSU is one of the elite programs at covering the spread nationally.

Maybe that means OSU is underrated by the public, or maybe it means Vegas hasn’t learned to trust a team coached by a man with a permed mullet (and who would?).

Regardless, it does prove one thing. That OSU might lose these away games in which it’s a dog (average margin of victory is -5.4, which means it has lost a lot of them), but the Cowboys — Gundy’s Cowboys — won’t go down without a war.