I didn't pull against Oklahoma State Saturday. I couldn't do that. But when the clock hit zero and Tulsa had beaten Oklahoma State 24-10, I'm not going to lie, I giggled. Not because I wanted Oklahoma State to lose. I hate that Oklahoma State lost. I giggled because there is something pretty damn funny about watching people get exactly what they wished for. Jimmy Harrel, Joe Hall and the rest of Stitt's minions wanted change and well, boys, you got it.
Mike Gundy is gone. Oklahoma State has a new coach, a new roster and apparently a whole lot more money to spend on football than we were led to believe a few years ago. The reported player payroll for this team is north of $24 million, including roughly $3.5 million this season for quarterback Drew Mestemaker. Saturday that bought Oklahoma State 10 points against Tulsa. Mestemaker threw two interceptions and lost a fumble, personally accounting for three of Oklahoma State's four turnovers. I keep trying to find some clever way to make that sound worse than it is, but I don't think one exists. A $24 million football team scored 10 points against Tulsa. That's the joke and it really doesn't need my help.
The part that isn't funny is what comes next. Oregon comes to Stillwater (L), then Murray State (W), followed by West Virginia (L), UCF (L), Houston (L), Colorado (?), Iowa State (W maybe), Kansas State (L), Texas Tech (L), Arizona State (L) and Kansas (L likely). After what I watched Saturday, I think this is a two- or three-win football team. I desperately hope I'm wrong, because another awful season isn't just another awful season anymore. In this quickly changing college football landscape Oklahoma State has picked one hell of a time to become irrelevant.
Nobody knows exactly what the next round of realignment or consolidation is going to look like, or when it's going to happen. But you'd have to be a complete idiot not to see where this is headed. When the next table gets set, what exactly is Oklahoma State's argument if we're winning two or three games a year? Who is going to be pounding the table saying, "We have to have Oklahoma State"? That should terrify this fanbase. Tulsa is embarrassing. Irrelevance is dangerous and could be a disaster.
It took Oklahoma State the better part of two decades to build a football brand that mattered nationally. OK....so we weren't Alabama, Ohio State or Georgia, but we mattered. We played in big games, won big games, went to major bowls and spent most Novembers playing football that still meant something. Mike Gundy won 170 games here, won the Big 12, won two Fiesta Bowls (one against the mighty Notre Dame), had eight 10-win seasons and came within inches of playing for a national championship (which I still think was a field goal).
That took years to build, and it is disappearing a hell of a lot faster than it was built.
Which brings me to the question I can't get out of my head: what the hell would Mike Gundy have done with $24 million?
I don't know. Nobody does. But give that crazy ******* $24 million to build a roster and tell him everybody thinks he's washed up, and I'd damn sure like to see what happens. Maybe we're talking about the College Football Playoff. Maybe we're not. But I'd much rather be arguing about whether Gundy could get a $24 million roster into the playoff than trying to figure out how a $24 million roster just managed 10 points against Tulsa.
And if this kind of money was available, where the hell was it before? That's a legitimate question. Oklahoma State seemed to have financial limitations right up until Gundy was gone, and then somebody apparently found the damn checkbook. If you're going to run off the guy who built the program and immediately spend more than $24 million trying to replace what he built, don't act surprised when people wonder what he might have done if somebody had handed him the same resources.
That brings me to Cow Patty Jimmy Harrel and Joe Hall. I've called Harrel Cow Patty Jimmy for couple of years now....He's a cattle rancher, so it fits, and he ought to understand something better than most people: bull**** can be useful as fertilizer, but it's a terrible way to run a university.
I've compared Harrel and Hall to a poor man's Jerry Jones before, but I'm starting to think that's unfair. Not to Harrel and Hall. To Jerry.
Let's remember Jerry's record here. He bought the Cowboys, hired Jimmy Johnson and together they built one of the greatest football teams I've ever watched. They won two Super Bowls together, Jerry and Jimmy blew the relationship apart, and Dallas won one more with Switzer and a roster largely built during the Johnson era. The Cowboys haven't been back to an NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season. That's thirty freaking years.
Jerry Jones has spent three decades trying to prove that he can recreate what happened with Jimmy Johnson while simultaneously providing thirty years of evidence that maybe Jimmy Johnson knew a little more about building a football team than Jerry did. So if Cow Patty Jimmy and Joe Hall really want to play Jerry Jones at Oklahoma State, somebody might want to point out that they're copying the last thirty years of Jerry instead of the first five.
And there's another pretty important difference: Jerry Jones owns the Dallas Cowboys. It's his team and his money. If he wants to spend the rest of his life playing general manager, Cowboys fans can ***** about it, but Jerry bought the damn thing. Jimmy Harrel doesn't own Oklahoma State. Joe Hall doesn't own Oklahoma State. Jim Hess doesn't own Oklahoma State. They are temporary stewards of something that belongs to all of us, and sometimes I think that distinction has been lost.
Which brings us to Hess. I'm not going to write some hopeful paragraph about Jim Hess eventually standing up to Harrel and Hall, because I don't believe that's going to happen. From where I sit, Hess looks a hell of a lot more like their puppet than the guy who's going to tell them no. The Board made him interim president and barely two months later made him the permanent president. They clearly saw what they wanted, and now Hess is sitting in the president's chair. A yes man!! That means he doesn't get to stand off to the side while Harrel and Hall play Jerry Jones and pretend none of this belongs to him. His name goes on the bill too.
The more I thought about those three names, though, the more obvious it became. Harrel. Hall. Hess. We've finally got a name for the whole operation: the Triple H Pig Barn.
Cow Patty Jimmy provides the fertilizer, Hall helps shovel it and Hess sits in the big chair while the smell keeps getting worse. Lately the Triple H Pig Barn seems capable of producing enough fertilizer to cover every pasture in western Oklahoma, but nobody seems particularly interested in cleaning out the barn.
That's really why I giggled Saturday. For years we heard all the reasons Mike Gundy was supposedly the problem. He was stubborn. He wouldn't change. He didn't understand NIL. He didn't understand the portal. He couldn't recruit anymore. He had lost his touch. Fine. Whatever you believed about Gundy, that argument is over now because he's gone. You don't get to blame him anymore.
This belongs to the people who wanted something different. Harrel, Hall and Hess wanted their version of Oklahoma State, and now they have it. There's a new president, a new football coach, a new roster and more than $24 million reportedly invested in players. You wanted control? Congratulations. You got it. Now comes the part that always seems to get forgotten when people fight this hard to get control: accountability.
If this team goes 2-10 or 3-9, I don't want to hear that it's a rebuild. I don't want to hear that the portal makes things difficult or that NIL changed college football. And please don't tell Oklahoma State fans that we simply don't have enough money to compete. You just spent more than $24 million making that argument pretty difficult to swallow.
The Tulsa loss will eventually become a line in a media guide. What matters is whether it was one ugly Saturday or a sign of something much bigger. If Oklahoma State football becomes irrelevant while the rest of college football decides what the next twenty years are going to look like, the cost of this experiment won't be measured in losses to Tulsa. It could be measured in whether Oklahoma State still has a seat at the table when all of this shaking and moving finally stops.
That's what bothers me about the Triple H Pig Barn. Harrel, Hall and Hess aren't gambling with their university. They're gambling with our university!
So no, I wasn't pulling against Oklahoma State Saturday, and I never will. But when that clock hit zero, I giggled. Sometimes watching people get exactly what they wished for is funny as hell, even when you hate what they did with it.
Mike Gundy is gone. Oklahoma State has a new coach, a new roster and apparently a whole lot more money to spend on football than we were led to believe a few years ago. The reported player payroll for this team is north of $24 million, including roughly $3.5 million this season for quarterback Drew Mestemaker. Saturday that bought Oklahoma State 10 points against Tulsa. Mestemaker threw two interceptions and lost a fumble, personally accounting for three of Oklahoma State's four turnovers. I keep trying to find some clever way to make that sound worse than it is, but I don't think one exists. A $24 million football team scored 10 points against Tulsa. That's the joke and it really doesn't need my help.
The part that isn't funny is what comes next. Oregon comes to Stillwater (L), then Murray State (W), followed by West Virginia (L), UCF (L), Houston (L), Colorado (?), Iowa State (W maybe), Kansas State (L), Texas Tech (L), Arizona State (L) and Kansas (L likely). After what I watched Saturday, I think this is a two- or three-win football team. I desperately hope I'm wrong, because another awful season isn't just another awful season anymore. In this quickly changing college football landscape Oklahoma State has picked one hell of a time to become irrelevant.
Nobody knows exactly what the next round of realignment or consolidation is going to look like, or when it's going to happen. But you'd have to be a complete idiot not to see where this is headed. When the next table gets set, what exactly is Oklahoma State's argument if we're winning two or three games a year? Who is going to be pounding the table saying, "We have to have Oklahoma State"? That should terrify this fanbase. Tulsa is embarrassing. Irrelevance is dangerous and could be a disaster.
It took Oklahoma State the better part of two decades to build a football brand that mattered nationally. OK....so we weren't Alabama, Ohio State or Georgia, but we mattered. We played in big games, won big games, went to major bowls and spent most Novembers playing football that still meant something. Mike Gundy won 170 games here, won the Big 12, won two Fiesta Bowls (one against the mighty Notre Dame), had eight 10-win seasons and came within inches of playing for a national championship (which I still think was a field goal).
That took years to build, and it is disappearing a hell of a lot faster than it was built.
Which brings me to the question I can't get out of my head: what the hell would Mike Gundy have done with $24 million?
I don't know. Nobody does. But give that crazy ******* $24 million to build a roster and tell him everybody thinks he's washed up, and I'd damn sure like to see what happens. Maybe we're talking about the College Football Playoff. Maybe we're not. But I'd much rather be arguing about whether Gundy could get a $24 million roster into the playoff than trying to figure out how a $24 million roster just managed 10 points against Tulsa.
And if this kind of money was available, where the hell was it before? That's a legitimate question. Oklahoma State seemed to have financial limitations right up until Gundy was gone, and then somebody apparently found the damn checkbook. If you're going to run off the guy who built the program and immediately spend more than $24 million trying to replace what he built, don't act surprised when people wonder what he might have done if somebody had handed him the same resources.
That brings me to Cow Patty Jimmy Harrel and Joe Hall. I've called Harrel Cow Patty Jimmy for couple of years now....He's a cattle rancher, so it fits, and he ought to understand something better than most people: bull**** can be useful as fertilizer, but it's a terrible way to run a university.
I've compared Harrel and Hall to a poor man's Jerry Jones before, but I'm starting to think that's unfair. Not to Harrel and Hall. To Jerry.
Let's remember Jerry's record here. He bought the Cowboys, hired Jimmy Johnson and together they built one of the greatest football teams I've ever watched. They won two Super Bowls together, Jerry and Jimmy blew the relationship apart, and Dallas won one more with Switzer and a roster largely built during the Johnson era. The Cowboys haven't been back to an NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season. That's thirty freaking years.
Jerry Jones has spent three decades trying to prove that he can recreate what happened with Jimmy Johnson while simultaneously providing thirty years of evidence that maybe Jimmy Johnson knew a little more about building a football team than Jerry did. So if Cow Patty Jimmy and Joe Hall really want to play Jerry Jones at Oklahoma State, somebody might want to point out that they're copying the last thirty years of Jerry instead of the first five.
And there's another pretty important difference: Jerry Jones owns the Dallas Cowboys. It's his team and his money. If he wants to spend the rest of his life playing general manager, Cowboys fans can ***** about it, but Jerry bought the damn thing. Jimmy Harrel doesn't own Oklahoma State. Joe Hall doesn't own Oklahoma State. Jim Hess doesn't own Oklahoma State. They are temporary stewards of something that belongs to all of us, and sometimes I think that distinction has been lost.
Which brings us to Hess. I'm not going to write some hopeful paragraph about Jim Hess eventually standing up to Harrel and Hall, because I don't believe that's going to happen. From where I sit, Hess looks a hell of a lot more like their puppet than the guy who's going to tell them no. The Board made him interim president and barely two months later made him the permanent president. They clearly saw what they wanted, and now Hess is sitting in the president's chair. A yes man!! That means he doesn't get to stand off to the side while Harrel and Hall play Jerry Jones and pretend none of this belongs to him. His name goes on the bill too.
The more I thought about those three names, though, the more obvious it became. Harrel. Hall. Hess. We've finally got a name for the whole operation: the Triple H Pig Barn.
Cow Patty Jimmy provides the fertilizer, Hall helps shovel it and Hess sits in the big chair while the smell keeps getting worse. Lately the Triple H Pig Barn seems capable of producing enough fertilizer to cover every pasture in western Oklahoma, but nobody seems particularly interested in cleaning out the barn.
That's really why I giggled Saturday. For years we heard all the reasons Mike Gundy was supposedly the problem. He was stubborn. He wouldn't change. He didn't understand NIL. He didn't understand the portal. He couldn't recruit anymore. He had lost his touch. Fine. Whatever you believed about Gundy, that argument is over now because he's gone. You don't get to blame him anymore.
This belongs to the people who wanted something different. Harrel, Hall and Hess wanted their version of Oklahoma State, and now they have it. There's a new president, a new football coach, a new roster and more than $24 million reportedly invested in players. You wanted control? Congratulations. You got it. Now comes the part that always seems to get forgotten when people fight this hard to get control: accountability.
If this team goes 2-10 or 3-9, I don't want to hear that it's a rebuild. I don't want to hear that the portal makes things difficult or that NIL changed college football. And please don't tell Oklahoma State fans that we simply don't have enough money to compete. You just spent more than $24 million making that argument pretty difficult to swallow.
The Tulsa loss will eventually become a line in a media guide. What matters is whether it was one ugly Saturday or a sign of something much bigger. If Oklahoma State football becomes irrelevant while the rest of college football decides what the next twenty years are going to look like, the cost of this experiment won't be measured in losses to Tulsa. It could be measured in whether Oklahoma State still has a seat at the table when all of this shaking and moving finally stops.
That's what bothers me about the Triple H Pig Barn. Harrel, Hall and Hess aren't gambling with their university. They're gambling with our university!
So no, I wasn't pulling against Oklahoma State Saturday, and I never will. But when that clock hit zero, I giggled. Sometimes watching people get exactly what they wished for is funny as hell, even when you hate what they did with it.