Oklahoma State Really is Great at Turning 3-Star Players into All-Big 12 Guys

On Thursday, I wrote about the difference in success of 2- and 3-star guys vs. the 4-star players OSU brings in out of high school. None of the research was surprising — essentially: 4-stars are far more likely to be All-Big 12 players than other players even if there are fewer of them — but I did come away with one little nugget that I thought was interesting.

(Again, this is not surprising, but) Oklahoma State is spectacular at turning 2- and 3-star players into All-Big 12 players. Here are the numbers on turning 2- and 3-star players into All-Conference performers.

National: 13 percent
Oklahoma State: 18 percent

This not insignificant. This list includes (but is not limited to) the following players.

Justin Blackmon
James Washington
Brandon Weeden
Justice Hill
Blake Jarwin
Russell Okung
Kendall Hunter

And on and on we could go. Obviously, the hit rate on 2- and 3-star players is a lot less than on 4-star players — which was the entire point of my original article — but I walked away impressed by OSU’s rate of turning both the 4-star guys into All-Conference players (28 percent) and OSU’s rate of turning everyone else into All-Conference players (18 percent). Both were well above the national average.

Think about it this way: The national average of a 4-star player becoming an All-Conference player in college is 21 percent. OSU nearly hits that with its 2- and 3-star guys at 18 percent. That’s crazy.

It’s also not unsurprising. OSU has created both a system and a culture for this to happen. It’s all the buzzword-y stuff you hear Mike Gundy and Co. talk about that sounds like nonsense at times but actually isn’t. It’s just impressive.

I knew it would be impressive when I stepped into the exercise, but I was unaware of just how impressive it would be. It doesn’t take away from the bigger-picture point that OSU would be better with better high school talent coming to Stillwater, but it does drive home the narrative that Gundy and his staff can identify, develop and foster talent at a far greater rate than most programs in the country.

You could prove this in any number of different ways, but taking 2- 3- and no-star guys and turning them into All-Conference performers during their time in Stillwater is one of the easiest and most straightforward methods of doing so, and on that front it’s hard to imagine a program doing it any better than OSU does.