How Has Oklahoma State Split its Run/Pass Offense in the Gundy Era?

Last week at his press conference previewing the Tulsa game, Mike Gundy said something that caught my ear. He started throwing random numbers and percentages out about his running backs (please check one of the spaces on your BINGO card), and broke down how he wanted carries to go this year.

He said if you run 80 plays and 25 of them are rushes, he wants Justice Hill to get 18 of those, another one (presumably J.D. King) seven and another one three. I’m going to ignore the fact that that doesn’t add up to 25 and instead want to look at whether this 25-55 run-pass distribution has been a staple of the Gundy era.

Now, I don’t think Gundy was being dogmatic in his numbers. I truly think he was just tossing random figures out there as he is wont to do, but it sort of coincides with this idea we’ve been talking about that he’s more conservative than he used to be on the field. That manifests in a variety of ways, but one of them is how much OSU throws it vs. how much they run it. Let’s take a look at the breakdown.

Random aside: One of my all-time favorite OSU football stats is that in 2007, OSU gained the exact same yardage on the ground and through the air — 3,161 yards in both. That’s impossible to do.

Anyway, Oklahoma State used to run it … a lot. Of the 908 plays it ran in 2008, nearly 600 of those were rushes. And that was, on a points per drive basis, one of the two best offenses of the Gundy era.

But then Dana and Weeden got to Stillwater in 2010, and all of that changed. OSU nearly reversed its numbers from 2009 to 2011 and was throwing it six out of every 10 plays. That has leveled out over the last four years, and the last two have almost been 50-50.

I think Gundy has two things working against him here when we talk about his conservative nature.

The first is that he has much better QBs now than he did when he first got to Stillwater. And yet OSU threw it just 6 percent more of the time in 2016 than it did in 2005. That seems odd.

The second thing working against him is that the Dana/Monken eras happened. Those are the offenses we remember being great so we say, “Just do that all the time! Throw it every play!” But when you compare OSU’s offense now to its 2005-2009 offense, they’re much more liberal through the air. Plus, I think a lot of those high percentages with the pass were due more to Weeden than anything. He ran a lot of run-pass option plays, and, well, when you give Weeden an option, you can guess what he’s going to do.

There’s probably a third thing, and that’s that Oklahoma State doesn’t take the chances (fakes, trick plays etc.) it used to, mostly because it doesn’t have to. You would expect a man with a mullet to run more trick plays than a XFL team, but OSU rarely does it.

So I don’t know if OSU is too conservative, but I do know that Gundy is getting what he wants. He’s always craved rushing the ball, and despite having a NFL talent at QB, the Pokes are running it almost half the time. It remains to be seen whether that will continue in 2017, but given the recent past, I have to believe that it will.