I had every intention of writing a completely different article this week about Oklahoma State. They had just beaten No. 6 Oregon, and a week after I basically buried this football team following a second straight loss to Tulsa, they turned around and played one heck of a football game. I'll admit, I watched it from the pool with one of my best friends and my neighbor. The adult beverages were flowing pretty freely that day, and when it was over, the whiskey came out and the victory cigars got lit. I was wrong about this team. At least I was wrong about this team Saturday night. I was perfectly happy to eat that crow and write about Drew Mestemaker, Eric Morris and how quickly winning can change your entire outlook. Oklahoma State won 39-31, and for a few hours I was perfectly content to just be a happy Oklahoma State fan again.
Then I started thinking about Hess and a freaking goalpost. After Oklahoma State beat Oregon and the students tore down the goalpost, he posted, "Good thing I already bought another goalpost yesterday!" I guess it was a great little social media moment, because it got picked up nationally. But here's the problem. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, Really? We had just lost to Tulsa for the second straight year. I watched that game and was so disgusted I didn't even bother making the drive to Stillwater the following week. I had already put an L beside Oregon and figured we might be looking at a two- or three-win football team. Yet somehow the president supposedly watched that same Tulsa game and thought, You know what? I'd better buy another goalpost because we're about to beat No. 6 Oregon and these kids are going to tear this sucker down. Come on, bro. Does this dude think I was born yesterday? Maybe that is exactly what happened, and if it did, apparently he had a hell of a lot more faith in this football team than I did.
Then Wednesday morning I got a text that made the whole thing bother me a lot more. Sources I trust tell me the story about him buying a new goalpost the week before the Oregon game was BS. I'm not going to identify those people, and I'm not going to drag them into this article, but I have no reason to believe they were feeding me a line. So now something that already struck me as a little too cute suddenly looked a whole lot different. Because if you're going to put something like that out there knowing exactly how people are going to take it look at our president, he had so much faith in the Cowboys that he already bought the next goalpost then it better be real. Maybe the story happened exactly the way it was presented. But after what I was told Wednesday morning, I have a whole lot more reason to question it than simply thinking the timing didn't make any damn sense. And at that point, this stopped being about a goalpost for me. It became about trust.
The timing was interesting because I had been listening to Newt Gingrich on a podcast the day before, and he told a story that stuck with me. Gingrich said that when he first became Speaker, an Arkansas congressman who had dealt with Bill Clinton when Clinton was governor gave him some advice. As Gingrich told it, this guy basically said Clinton could make an agreement with you, and by the time you walked out the door he'd already have broken it. Then came the part that stuck with me: "You just had to know that." I'm not bringing that up because I want to have some debate about Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich. I really don't care. What stuck with me was the idea behind the story. Once you reach a point where you have to account for whether somebody's word is going to hold up after you leave the room, you deal with that person differently. You may still work with them. You may even like them. You may laugh with them and shake hands with them. But in the back of your mind, you know something could change the second you walk out the door.
And for whatever reason, when I heard that story, I thought about what I've been watching at Oklahoma State. I've used the word puppet before when talking about Hess, and maybe this is the best way I can explain what I mean by it. I'm not suggesting there is literally one guy sitting somewhere pulling every string and telling the president what to say. What bothers me is that I still have no idea where the man himself ends and the people applying pressure to him begin. Oklahoma State has worked pretty hard to present him as a servant leader. That isn't even my description. An official OSU profile quotes one of his colleagues using those exact words: "I would describe Jim as a servant leader." Fine. Maybe he is. But every time I hear that phrase now, the same question pops into my head: Who exactly is that servant leader serving?
That question didn't start with a goalpost. Shortly after the Innovation Foundation mess blew up, I sat down with a gentleman who had dealt frequently with Hess while he was working under Kayse Shrum. He told me about being in a meeting where, according to his account, Hess hadn't been adequately briefed on the problem they were there to discuss. He described him as struggling to understand what everybody was talking about, not really knowing what needed to be done and, more importantly to me, not asking the questions that would have gotten to the root of the issue. I wasn't in that room. That's the story this gentleman told me. But I remember leaving that conversation thinking the same thing I've thought a lot since then: Who's actually driving the bus?
Because that's leadership to me. It isn't walking into the room after everybody else has figured out the answer and delivering the talking points. Leadership is walking into a room where the problem is ugly, asking enough questions to understand what is actually happening, figuring out who's full of crap and who isn't, making a decision and then being willing to stand behind it when the pressure starts. That's where my concern comes from. What happens when pressure comes from the Board? What happens when it comes from donors? What happens when faculty, alumni, politicians or social media are all screaming something different? At some point, I don't want to know what the room thinks. I want to know what the president thinks. What does he believe? What is he willing to stand behind when standing behind it becomes uncomfortable? I don't need somebody who is really good at figuring out which way the wind is blowing. I need somebody who knows where he stands when the wind starts blowing.
And I think that question matters even more when you remember how he ended up in that chair. When the Board named Hess interim president in February 2025, it publicly said it would move forward with a search for Oklahoma State's next president. Less than three months later, the Board removed the interim title and appointed him to a three-year term. Maybe that turns out to have been exactly the right decision. But when the Board tells everybody it is going to move forward with a presidential search and then decides a couple of months later that it has already found its guy, independence matters to me even more. That's really what I mean when I use the puppet analogy. It isn't about whether somebody is nice, likable or can give a good speech. A puppet can be incredibly likable. The problem is what happens when somebody starts pulling the strings. If the pressure changes, does the position change with it? If the person applying the pressure changes, does the answer change too?
And that's why something as stupid as a goalpost gets under my skin. In the grand scheme of Oklahoma State University, I don't give a damn about a goalpost. Throw another one in Theta Pond next Saturday for all I care. What bothers me is the feeling that I'm constantly being handed these perfectly packaged little stories and expected to smile, hit the like button and move along. Maybe he really did buy the thing the week before the Oregon game. Maybe after watching us lose to Tulsa for the second year in a row, he thought there was a pretty good chance we'd turn around and knock off No. 6 Oregon and the students would tear down the goalpost. If that's what happened, good on him. But when I saw that post, my reaction wasn't, What a great story. My reaction was, Come on, man. And after what I was told Wednesday morning, I'm questioning it even more.
Maybe I've gotten cynical. I'll own that. But people don't become cynical about an institution they love for no reason. Cynicism grows when you start wondering whether you're getting the whole story, and once that happens, even the harmless stuff starts making you raise an eyebrow. That's why the Gingrich story stuck with me so much. You just had to know that. Think about how damaging that sentence really is. Once people decide they "just have to know" something about the reliability of the person they're dealing with, you've already got a trust problem. And trust is a hell of a lot harder to rebuild than a goalpost.
The funny thing is that Saturday night Oklahoma State football gave me exactly the opposite feeling. Nobody had to manufacture anything for me. Nobody had to tell me what I was supposed to think or how I was supposed to feel. I watched Oklahoma State beat No. 6 Oregon from my pool. I watched Drew Mestemaker play like a completely different quarterback than the guy I had hammered a week earlier. The whiskey came out, the victory cigars got lit, and for a few hours I was just a really happy Oklahoma State fan again. That part didn't need a public relations strategy. It didn't need a cute social media post. It was real.
Maybe that's all I'm asking for from the rest of Oklahoma State. I don't need another perfectly packaged story. I don't need another slogan like The Code Calls, a campaign (by the way) that OSU itself says is supposed to represent character, standing for what matters and doing what is right even when it's hard. And I really don't need to be told somebody is a servant leader.
I just want to know who he's serving.
Then I started thinking about Hess and a freaking goalpost. After Oklahoma State beat Oregon and the students tore down the goalpost, he posted, "Good thing I already bought another goalpost yesterday!" I guess it was a great little social media moment, because it got picked up nationally. But here's the problem. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, Really? We had just lost to Tulsa for the second straight year. I watched that game and was so disgusted I didn't even bother making the drive to Stillwater the following week. I had already put an L beside Oregon and figured we might be looking at a two- or three-win football team. Yet somehow the president supposedly watched that same Tulsa game and thought, You know what? I'd better buy another goalpost because we're about to beat No. 6 Oregon and these kids are going to tear this sucker down. Come on, bro. Does this dude think I was born yesterday? Maybe that is exactly what happened, and if it did, apparently he had a hell of a lot more faith in this football team than I did.
Then Wednesday morning I got a text that made the whole thing bother me a lot more. Sources I trust tell me the story about him buying a new goalpost the week before the Oregon game was BS. I'm not going to identify those people, and I'm not going to drag them into this article, but I have no reason to believe they were feeding me a line. So now something that already struck me as a little too cute suddenly looked a whole lot different. Because if you're going to put something like that out there knowing exactly how people are going to take it look at our president, he had so much faith in the Cowboys that he already bought the next goalpost then it better be real. Maybe the story happened exactly the way it was presented. But after what I was told Wednesday morning, I have a whole lot more reason to question it than simply thinking the timing didn't make any damn sense. And at that point, this stopped being about a goalpost for me. It became about trust.
The timing was interesting because I had been listening to Newt Gingrich on a podcast the day before, and he told a story that stuck with me. Gingrich said that when he first became Speaker, an Arkansas congressman who had dealt with Bill Clinton when Clinton was governor gave him some advice. As Gingrich told it, this guy basically said Clinton could make an agreement with you, and by the time you walked out the door he'd already have broken it. Then came the part that stuck with me: "You just had to know that." I'm not bringing that up because I want to have some debate about Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich. I really don't care. What stuck with me was the idea behind the story. Once you reach a point where you have to account for whether somebody's word is going to hold up after you leave the room, you deal with that person differently. You may still work with them. You may even like them. You may laugh with them and shake hands with them. But in the back of your mind, you know something could change the second you walk out the door.
And for whatever reason, when I heard that story, I thought about what I've been watching at Oklahoma State. I've used the word puppet before when talking about Hess, and maybe this is the best way I can explain what I mean by it. I'm not suggesting there is literally one guy sitting somewhere pulling every string and telling the president what to say. What bothers me is that I still have no idea where the man himself ends and the people applying pressure to him begin. Oklahoma State has worked pretty hard to present him as a servant leader. That isn't even my description. An official OSU profile quotes one of his colleagues using those exact words: "I would describe Jim as a servant leader." Fine. Maybe he is. But every time I hear that phrase now, the same question pops into my head: Who exactly is that servant leader serving?
That question didn't start with a goalpost. Shortly after the Innovation Foundation mess blew up, I sat down with a gentleman who had dealt frequently with Hess while he was working under Kayse Shrum. He told me about being in a meeting where, according to his account, Hess hadn't been adequately briefed on the problem they were there to discuss. He described him as struggling to understand what everybody was talking about, not really knowing what needed to be done and, more importantly to me, not asking the questions that would have gotten to the root of the issue. I wasn't in that room. That's the story this gentleman told me. But I remember leaving that conversation thinking the same thing I've thought a lot since then: Who's actually driving the bus?
Because that's leadership to me. It isn't walking into the room after everybody else has figured out the answer and delivering the talking points. Leadership is walking into a room where the problem is ugly, asking enough questions to understand what is actually happening, figuring out who's full of crap and who isn't, making a decision and then being willing to stand behind it when the pressure starts. That's where my concern comes from. What happens when pressure comes from the Board? What happens when it comes from donors? What happens when faculty, alumni, politicians or social media are all screaming something different? At some point, I don't want to know what the room thinks. I want to know what the president thinks. What does he believe? What is he willing to stand behind when standing behind it becomes uncomfortable? I don't need somebody who is really good at figuring out which way the wind is blowing. I need somebody who knows where he stands when the wind starts blowing.
And I think that question matters even more when you remember how he ended up in that chair. When the Board named Hess interim president in February 2025, it publicly said it would move forward with a search for Oklahoma State's next president. Less than three months later, the Board removed the interim title and appointed him to a three-year term. Maybe that turns out to have been exactly the right decision. But when the Board tells everybody it is going to move forward with a presidential search and then decides a couple of months later that it has already found its guy, independence matters to me even more. That's really what I mean when I use the puppet analogy. It isn't about whether somebody is nice, likable or can give a good speech. A puppet can be incredibly likable. The problem is what happens when somebody starts pulling the strings. If the pressure changes, does the position change with it? If the person applying the pressure changes, does the answer change too?
And that's why something as stupid as a goalpost gets under my skin. In the grand scheme of Oklahoma State University, I don't give a damn about a goalpost. Throw another one in Theta Pond next Saturday for all I care. What bothers me is the feeling that I'm constantly being handed these perfectly packaged little stories and expected to smile, hit the like button and move along. Maybe he really did buy the thing the week before the Oregon game. Maybe after watching us lose to Tulsa for the second year in a row, he thought there was a pretty good chance we'd turn around and knock off No. 6 Oregon and the students would tear down the goalpost. If that's what happened, good on him. But when I saw that post, my reaction wasn't, What a great story. My reaction was, Come on, man. And after what I was told Wednesday morning, I'm questioning it even more.
Maybe I've gotten cynical. I'll own that. But people don't become cynical about an institution they love for no reason. Cynicism grows when you start wondering whether you're getting the whole story, and once that happens, even the harmless stuff starts making you raise an eyebrow. That's why the Gingrich story stuck with me so much. You just had to know that. Think about how damaging that sentence really is. Once people decide they "just have to know" something about the reliability of the person they're dealing with, you've already got a trust problem. And trust is a hell of a lot harder to rebuild than a goalpost.
The funny thing is that Saturday night Oklahoma State football gave me exactly the opposite feeling. Nobody had to manufacture anything for me. Nobody had to tell me what I was supposed to think or how I was supposed to feel. I watched Oklahoma State beat No. 6 Oregon from my pool. I watched Drew Mestemaker play like a completely different quarterback than the guy I had hammered a week earlier. The whiskey came out, the victory cigars got lit, and for a few hours I was just a really happy Oklahoma State fan again. That part didn't need a public relations strategy. It didn't need a cute social media post. It was real.
Maybe that's all I'm asking for from the rest of Oklahoma State. I don't need another perfectly packaged story. I don't need another slogan like The Code Calls, a campaign (by the way) that OSU itself says is supposed to represent character, standing for what matters and doing what is right even when it's hard. And I really don't need to be told somebody is a servant leader.
I just want to know who he's serving.