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Slow Starts and Home Losses Shape Disappointing 2017 Season

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On Saturday morning, Oklahoma State will hold its Senior Day, with one of the better classes to ever play in Stillwater doing so for the last time. The school’s all-time leading passer and one of the best receivers to ever do it — whether he finishes at No. 1 in yards or not — are going to end their careers in maybe the most anticlimactic way imaginable.

It’s not just that it’s against Kansas. It’s not just that it’s an 11 a.m. kick. That’s a strong possibility anytime you welcome a 1-win team on a 10-game skid. The letdown of the whole thing is that the game is essentially meaningless, other than to avoid a sub-.500 home record for the first time since Mike Gundy took over and to make 10 wins a possibility for sixth time in that same span.

The latter part of that statement is impressive, especially considering that double-digit wins only happened three times B.G. (before Gundy). The former? A bit disheartening.

Instead of a sendoff to the Big 12 title game and more, the Cowboys can only hope to whoop up on an abysmal Kansas team for some kind of style points for bowl season. As long as they don’t start slow again.

“For whatever reason I can’t figure out what I’m doing or not doing that keeps us from showing up in the first half of our home games, and I shared that with the team,” Mike Gundy said after the K-State loss.

“We all need to look at ourselves and figure out what’s going on because we, for whatever reason, we’re not showing up and we get in a hole.”

Slow starts were not an issue early in the season, home or away. What turned out to be a cupcake non-conference slate saw the Cowboys winning first quarters 59-0 heading into Big 12 play. The Cowboys were never going to maintain that pace in conference play but several slow starts hampered the Pokes’ chances.

In five games, Oklahoma State failed to score a touchdown on either of its first two drives: South Alabama, Baylor, Texas, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. Against South Alabama (?!) and Baylor, that’s not a big deal. Against the other three, it took the most Cardiac of Cowboy performances just to have a chance late.

But playing exciting college football as Gundy might call it after a win, is not only taxing on the fan base, it’s playing with fire. Sooner or later you’re going to get burned and the Cowboys got burned in three games trying to come back late.

“Today we were in an unbelievably deep hole,” Gundy said. “Quite honestly I don’t know how we got back in it at the point to where we had a real chance to win in the end and then couldn’t execute. We couldn’t throw we couldn’t catch, which chances of that happening were slim in my opinion.”

That’s the problem. A mental lapse, a missed throw (our three), a controversial call — those things are going to happen late in games. And when you leave it up to luck a on regular basis, you’re not always going to be 2015 lucky.

“So you talk about a special teams touchdown, you lost the turnover battle,” said Gundy “I don’t know how many poor throws and/or dropped passes we had, and we weren’t any good on third down, and we gave up at least three, and maybe four huge plays on defense. So you stir all that up and that’s not a good thing. That’s really what happened.”

Oklahoma State still has a chance to send out its seniors on a good note, though a bit subdued. But slow starts at home limited the Cowboys, a turned a possibly special and historic season into a mild disappointment based on your point of view.

 

 

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