OSU Is Improbably (?) Slowing the Pace on Offense … and It’s Working

One thing we maybe haven’t talked enough about is the seeming philosophical shift in offensive production for Oklahoma State during their recent three-game winning streak.

I thought of this when I was editing Kyle Cox’s piece on Spencer Sanders’ development on Sunday. Sanders has thrown it so few times over the last three games and run it less than he was early on. Some of this is dictated by teams that play slower (? Kansas), but the shift is big enough and the sample size large enough that I started wondering how much of it has been purposeful from OSU’s perspective.

There are two ways to slow the game down for a young QB. The first is for him to hit the (totally arbitrary but at the same time, completely reasonable) 15-game mark for his career. The second is to, you know, literally slow the game down.

Consider the following numbers.

OSU in its first seven games (4-3): 79.6 offensive plays per game
OSU in its last three games (3-0): 60.3 offensive plays per game

Again, some of this is dictated by what other teams do. Some of it is dictated by the fact that Chuba can chew off 80 yards before you can figure out how to say Ogbongbemiga. But some of it seems to be real. A 20-play differential isn’t all circumstantial.

Here’s their game log in terms of total plays.

Oregon State: 76
McNeese: 76
Tulsa: 68
Texas: 89
Kansas State: 69
Texas Tech: 93
Baylor: 86
Iowa State: 55
TCU: 56
Kansas: 70

So three of their five lowest outputs (including the bottom two) have come in the last three games (all wins). There’s a world in which OSU has become — I cannot believe I’m about to type these words — a team that wants to grind you out on defense and win by pacing the game more slowly on offense than before.

For the sake of context, OSU has only had 13 games in the Gundy era in which they’ve run fewer than 60 plays and only five total this decade. And two of those have come in the last three games.

Maybe that’s nothing, but maybe it’s not nothing. And at the very least, as OSU enters its final two-game stretch against West Virginia and OU, it’s something to keep an eye on as Gundy makes the full transformation from the Dana era into his dream world of a Bill Snyder era in which they throw it 11 times a game and run it the rest, which [checks notes] is kind of exactly what they’ve been doing.