Porter: Oklahoma State Needs a Consistent Third Option on Offense

There has — more often than not — been a clear skill-position pecking order in the Mike Gundy era. First comes Blackmon, then comes Randle and then after that Cooper and so on down the line.

So far in 2019, there is a clear top two and then … ?

Who’s OSU’s third guy? What do they do in games where Tylan Wallace and Chuba Hubbard are taken away and they have to go elsewhere? When teams are begging them to go elsewhere and they have to rely on Spencer Sanders to get the ball where defenses are not?

This is some of what they ran into against Texas over the weekend, and there weren’t a ton of answers. Here’s the crux of it: If you ask 10 different fans who the third guy is, you might get seven different answers. Jelani Woods, Dillon Stoner, Braydon Johnson, Jordan McCray, Landon Wolf and C.J. Moore would probably all be among them.

Nobody has truly emerged.

Logic would say it’s Stoner. He’s been there the longest and seems to be the most reliable. He even had the most targets in Austin. But he had a bad drop on Saturday and isn’t as dynamic as some of the other talent OSU has. Don’t get me wrong, he’s good, but should he be your third option on offense? I don’t know.

Could it be Moore or McCray? Maybe even Patrick McKaufman? I saw one reader suggest that to cure what ailed OSU in the red zone they should … I dunno … toss it to their four receivers at 6’5 or taller between McCray, Moore, McKaufman and Woods. Instead, OSU tried to run Chuba over and over even though all Texas was trying to do was stop Chuba.

“I thought the game plan was great by our defensive staff,” said Texas head coach Tom Herman after the game. “In our base call we were going to trap the corners, trap the nickel, and really kind of squeeze everything from the outside in (to stop Chuba), other than to Wallace’s side. To his side we were going to double him.”

“Tylan had five catches for 83 yards and no touchdowns. That is as good as you’re going to do against those two guys that are as good as there is in our conference.”

Texas’ entire gameplan — as it should have been — was to stop Chuba and Tylan. That’s what happens when you have the leading receiver and rusher in the country. Texas had the plan and the athletes to do it. Not every team will. Some teams will double Tylan and it will matter not.

But the opportunity you have if you’re Sean Gleeson, Mike Gundy and Oklahoma State is to develop a true pecking order beyond them. Right now? It seems like it’s mostly confusion.

I know a lot of this is probably on Sanders. When things speed up, you naturally go to the safest place you can find. For OSU, the safest place you can find wears 2 on his back.

But if OSU wants to go on the run it needs to go on to have a chance at the end of the season of upending OU and making it to Dallas for the Big 12 Championship, Sanders and Co. have to have a true backup plan beyond just Chuba and Tylan. Because every team they play is going to try and erase two of the best to suit up in Stillwater in the Gundy era (and maybe ever), and — on Saturday anyway — that was enough to give OSU its first loss of the year.