Safety Mose Phillips To Miss Second Straight Game, Tight End Oscar Hammond Ramping Up

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STILLWATER — The Cowboys will be without a starting safety for a second straight week, but perhaps their best pass-catching tight end is starting to get a little more put on his plate.

Mose Phillips III missed Oklahoma State’s loss to Houston this past week with a shoulder injury he suffered the week before against UCF. OSU coach Eric Morris said Phillips would be out again when the Cowboys host Colorado for homecoming at 6 p.m. Saturday in Boone Pickens Stadium.

Phillips has started four of the Cowboys’ games this season. The two he hasn’t started: Tulsa and Houston, the Cowboys’ two losses.

With Phillips out, Evan Jackson played all 76 snaps against the Cougars on Saturday. He had been averaging 28.2 defensive snaps a game, but that includes a 66-snap performance against UCF when Phillips got injured in the first half. Before the UCF game, Jackson had been averaging 18.6 defensive snaps a game.

Per PFF, Jackson was targeted six times in Houston and gave up four catches for 28 yards and a TD.

But while we’re overanalyzing snap counts, tight end Oscar Hammond played more than five times as many offensive snaps Saturday than he had all season.

Hammond was out there for 16 snaps against the Cougars after having previously played three offensive snaps: the three kneels downs in Morgantown.

“Yeah, finally healthy,” Morris said. “I thought he played good. He had a couple of mental things that, a couple of mental busts that get him back in the action and playing and reacting and doing everything fast.

“He’s a different dynamic. I think he played well doing some stuff on the perimeter for us. He was really good on special teams for us, so another big body that we can trust in a lot of different roles for this team. So, yeah, I think you’ll see a continuous us just adding him more and more in there with Carson (Kolb).”

Kolb has had to carry almost the Cowboys’ entire tight end load to this point, having played 338 snaps. Morgan McPhaul has played the second-most snaps with just 58.

Kolb is a remarkable story going from walk-on to starter on a team that has had the successes that OSU has this season, but he has often graded out poorly on PFF — for whatever that’s worth to you.

Hammond joined the Cowboys ahead of last season but missed the entire year with a preseason injury. Before that, he played for Morris at North Texas in 2023, where he was the Mean Green’s primary pass-catching tight end, finishing with 19 catches for 238 yards and a touchdown across 10 games.

“Oscar, he’s a big guy who can run,” OSU receiver Miles Coleman said. “He’s got crazy speed. He’s a good route runner, so I think having him, his presence in the passing game is gonna help us a lot. Just having a bigger guy out there to switch up the defenses, like having him out there then having me out there, they’re not gonna know what to do. So I think having his presence out there is gonna help us a lot.”

Last week, Morris sounded confident in freshman receiver Dayvon Standard making his college debut in Houston, but as it got closer to game time, Standard was ruled out with injury again. Morris gave an update on him Tuesday, as well.

“We are just slowly working him back into it and getting his legs back underneath him,” Morris said. “And so we’ll continue to kind of work and see what kind of role he can progress into throughout the course of the year.”