The Top 5 Quotes from Mike Gundy’s Post-Big 12 Championship News Conference

ARLINGTON, Texas — Big 12 title No. 2 for Mike Gundy will have to wait.

Oklahoma State lost to Texas 49-21 on Saturday in the Big 12 Championship. Here are five quotes from Gundy’s postgame news conference with video of his full conference below.

On OSU’s Rough Day on the Ground

Boasting the nation’s leading rusher, OSU ran for just 31 yards Saturday against the Longhorns.

Texas scored 21 points in the first quarter, making it tough to justify running the ball when OSU was already playing catchup. It also certainly didn’t help that OSU was going up against T’Vondre Sweat and a rush defense that ranked in the top five nationally coming into the game.

Ollie Gordon, the aforementioned nation’s leading rusher, carried just 13 times Saturday for 34 yards. Considering all the heavy lifting Gordon has done for this team entering the season, it would’ve been hard to imagine OSU winning this game given that line.

“We were going to use the run game some, but we knew we had to try to throw the ball more than what we had done in most games,” Gundy said. “They’re really good up front. They’ve got mass, and at times it can be a little difficult.

“… Early we didn’t get off to a good start, so we ended up being a little more one-dimensional offensively than what we would have wanted to.”

On a Rough Defensive Outing

Bluntly, the Texas offense dominated OSU’s defense Saturday.

The Longhorns had a season-high 662 yards of total offense to go with 33 first downs and one, singular punt.

Texas faced just one third down in the first quarter, a quarter it scored 21 points and had 197 yards of total offense in. It was a torching.

“There’s things we needed to do against them in man coverage to try to get the extra guy in the box at times,” Gundy said. “They did a good job on cross concepts and such and got us in some trail technique. They did a good job, as I said. They had some good concepts and schemes. When we went into the game, we felt like we had to be in a little bit more man than we needed to, just to kind of match up up front. We didn’t get as much pressure on the quarterback as we needed to. It’s not easy to get pressure on him. We rushed three people at times. There’s times it worked for us, and there’s times when he sat back there longer than what we wanted. We kind of knew that going in that might happen, but we tried to rush three, we rushed four, we rushed five, there’s times we rushed six.

“They had some good concepts on scheme. I didn’t hear there was a lot of what we hadn’t seen. They did a good job of getting the ball quick into the hands of skill kids and getting kick-out blocks and getting down the field and making plays.”

No Comeback Saturday

OSU overcame a 14-point deficit against Houston two weeks ago and an 18-point deficit against BYU last week. The comeback machine ran out of juice Saturday.

The Cowboys trailed by as many as 35 on Saturday. OSU had been coming out of halftime well, but it wasn’t able to replicate that in AT&T Stadium.

Texas was forced to punt for the one and only time Saturday on its first drive out of halftime. The Cowboys answered with a quick first down and a nine-yard gain before a wayward snap forced the Cowboys into a 3rd-and-8 that they were unable to convert. Any momentum the Pokes thought they had ended there. Had OSU scored on that drive, it would’ve cut the Longhorns’ lead to 35-21.

“We came out and got a stop,” Gundy said. “Then we rolled a little bit, and we had a high snap. We were on second and two or three. We had a high snap, we got sent back, and they stopped us. Ifs and buts, you know all that. To me, I envision and think about what if you go down and score there? At least you may kind of clamp them a little bit on play calling.

“But I don’t want to take away from Texas. Today they were really well coached, and they played good. They have good players, and they have good coaches. So I don’t want to take anything away from anybody. I still like my team.”

No Break for the Coaching Staff

Gundy said he plans on giving his players seven or eight days off — something Gundy said is unprecedented but that this team needs it.

The staff, however, gets no such break. With the transfer portal open and the early signing period starting Dec. 20, the staff is back to work.

“They’re gone,” Gundy said. “Everybody’s out here — I say everybody, most of them will be out of here tomorrow morning, and the rest will be out Monday afternoon or Tuesday. Everybody’s gone, hitting it and back at it. We get 12 hours off. It’s awesome.”

‘Our Guys, They Had an Unbelievable Year’

It might be tough for the OSU faithful to stomach a blowout loss in a conference title game, but Gundy is keeping things in perspective.

The start of this year went about as poorly as possible for the Pokes — with a loss to South Alabama. OSU then started Big 12 play 0-1 after a trip to Ames, and that was before anyone knew the Cyclones would have a pulse this season after gambling investigations gutted their roster. So given all of that, the fact that the Cowboys even made it to this game is somewhat remarkable.

“Our guys, they had an unbelievable year,” Gundy said. “I told them that. Sometimes you don’t win — you come up short. But there’s no way I’m taking anything away from what these guys were able to accomplish. I couldn’t be any more proud of the way they competed to get to this point. Week in, week out, they stayed with the process. They didn’t lose their train of thought. They didn’t lose the process of preparing each week. We’re lucky. We get to play another game. We’re going to find out where we’re going to go in a bowl game. We’ll get to go play again.

“I wanted them to know how much I appreciate that and what they brought to the table and that there’s nobody taking anything away from this football team, in my opinion, as we move forward to a week off and then get ready to play in a bowl game.”