Oklahoma State is 4-2 at the Halfway Point So Is the Sky Actually Falling?

This week, as angst, and even panic, sets in on Oklahoma State fans and followers not accustomed to 1-2 conference starts (or losing to Texas Tech or Iowa State in any locale on this planet), I thought of a European children’s story. Henny Penny and Chicken Little — or as they’re known in my house, HP and Chick Lit.

Chicken Little was in the woods.
A seed fell on his tail.

He met Henny Penny and said,
“The sky is falling.
I saw it with my eyes.
I heard it with my ears.
Some of it fell on my tail.”

He met Turkey Lurkey, Ducky Lucky,
and Goosey Loosey.

They ran to tell the king.
They met Foxy Loxy.
They ran into his den,
And they did not come out again.

The moral of the story, as you can tell if you can read, is that sometimes a misperception of what is actually happening can lead to poor decision-making and dire potential outcomes.

None of us are in a position to make any decisions (unless you’re reading it, Coach Holder, and if you are, thank you), but the concept remains, and I think it even applies to us all the same. The reason? Boosters, fans and the masses usually (eventually) get what they want, costs and unintended consequences be damned.

Mike Gundy is a great coach.

This is a thing that I had to remind myself of earlier this week when I was fuming about what portends to be a down year (maybe a really down year) in his tenure. There is no statistical evidence, nothing you can show me, nothing I can show you that proves he’s anything other than a great coach. He just is. One three-game stretch doesn’t change that. Great coaches don’t become not great coaches because two freshman QBs lit you up.

Hypotheticals are not real.

This is something I had to remind myself of this week as I was blathering on about how if two QB situations had gone differently then OSU might be 60-50 since 2010 instead of 82-28. They didn’t go 60-50. They did go 82-28. They have gotten elite QB play consistently in Stillwater and look to be poised to do so once again in the post-Corn era.

Down years are … fine.

This, while hard to swallow in the moment, is something I had to remind myself of this week. It’s a statistical reality that is largely unavoidable. It has happened to pretty much everyone outside of the very, very top tier of teams. Look at these three programs, all of which have been arguably as good or better than Oklahoma State in the last decade.

Notre Dame: 10-3 in 2015 | 4-8 in 2016 | 10-3 in 2017
TCU: 11-2 in 2015 | 6-7 in 2016 | 11-3 in 2017
Oklahoma: 11-2 in 2013 | 8-5 in 2014 | 11-2 in 2015

All three of those programs have (or had) long-time coaches who experienced a one-year dip in production. I actually think TCU is the best example here because it is the school most comparable with Oklahoma State in terms of talent and resources.

These things just … happen. They especially happen at schools where talent at non-skill positions can’t hold the rope when the skill positions aren’t running on all cylinders. They happen maybe most of all when you’re recruiting classes in the 30s and not the 20s or the 10s.

I don’t think Gundy is beyond reproach or that we shouldn’t ask questions. I think the overall trajectory of Oklahoma State’s recruiting has been poor — I’ve always thought this — and that it gets easily exposed in years when you don’t have a top-80 pick in the NFL Draft at the helm (as OSU has in five of the last eight seasons).

There’s a lot of football left.

This is something I had to remind myself of this week as I wallowed about the dang Cheez-It Bowl in late December, or worse, me eating Cheez-Its while not watching OSU in a bowl at all. College football is a beautiful, chaotic mess. Nobody knows what’s going to go down over the next seven weeks.

Who would have said after the Texas game in 2014 that that game would end the misery for that team and that the winningest QB in school history was about to take over the program? Who would have said after the West Virginia game in 2013 that Ben Grogan would be a legend in Stillwater and Oklahoma State would soon play for the Big 12 title?

We have no idea what’s going to go down during the rest of 2018. Maybe OSU thumps Kansas State and somehow beats Texas. Then what? Then they’re 6-2 with a meager Baylor team and a TCU squad searching for some offense on the slate. I know that sounds like absolute poppycock right now, and maybe it will be, but OSU just hasn’t been as bad as everyone is saying. The reality of this season is that they’ve played one horrendous half. One 30-minute stretch that made you feel things and say things you didn’t want to feel and say. A seed fell on his tail.

Oklahoma State’s infrastructure is good. Its coaches are good, if a bit stubborn. Its regime is successful. Could it be more successful? Sure. But as we’ve talked about before, the risk of throwing away 10-win season after 10-win season for the reward of maybe being able to take the next step with somebody else is something you have to nail. Georgia did it when it moved on from Mark Richt to Kirby Smart. I’m not sure anyone else has.

Just because the most recent stretch of football has been bad doesn’t mean the trajectory is bad. I’m sure the comment sections of TCU, Notre Dame and OU blogs were a festival of misanthropy during those down years above. But that didn’t change the fact that those three teams went a combined 32-8 in the year after they were down.

The good outweighs the bad by several factors, and while the beginning of this season has shined a light on some weaknesses that Mason Rudolph and James Washington kept hidden for several years, these are not necessarily fundamental issues based on, you know, how OSU fundamentally wins games. They are not cracks in the foundation. Even if Oklahoma State plays out the string and misses a bowl for the first time in forever, it doesn’t mean the entire thing is off the rails.

Good organizations — great organizations! — have bad years. Losing seasons. One 12-game stretch does not a program make. Who knows what’s going to happen over the next six or seven games that we’ll look back on when OSU is playing for the 2021 Big 12 title and say, “That’s where this whole thing started.”