STILLWATER – There’s an old saying, It takes one to know one. It is usually used in conversation in a light-hearted, even a joking manner. However, with outgoing athletic director Mike Holder you have to consider it literally when it comes to his record of hiring coaches. Holder came from an interesting background in moving into the athletic director role at Oklahoma State. He was the golf coach. I can’t name any other golf coaches that became Power Five school athletic directors. His predecessor, Harry Birdwell, was a businessman and executive before jumping in as athletic director when Terry Don Phillips departed. Phillips, a lawyer, had come up through the ranks as an assistant football coach before being a college athletics administrator. Over the years, most Oklahoma State athletic directors like Myron Roderick, Floyd Gass, and Henry Iba had been coaches.
Eddie Sutton once told me that a coach, a really good coach, is always a coach and give him the proper information and he can coach any sport. There is some proof out there of that premise. Sutton coached golf in his first coaching stop at Tulsa Central High School despite not playing the sport himself.
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Mike Holder being interviewed in Tulsa
Holder played and coached golf quite well as a two-time third-team All-American and the Big Eight Conference individual champion in 1970. He went on to coach Oklahoma State to eight NCAA National Championships and he had six individual NCAA champions, 12 National Players-of-the-Year, and 112 All-Americans. Holder certainly could coach, but as athletic director could he pick out coaches.
Many folks believe that Holder is responsible for the winningest football coach in Oklahoma State history. While Holder endorsed Mike Gundy, it was Birdwell that made that hire. It was also Birdwell that hired ultra-successful women’s basketball head coach Kurt Budke.
Holder’s first coaching hire was his replacement as golf coach in Mike McGraw and McGraw wasted no time coaching the Cowboys to an NCAA Championship in 2006. He also kept those Big 12 Championships rolling with five of those. Then in 2012 the Cowboys finished sixth in the Big 12, played poorly in the NCAA regionals and missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 65-years. A second-place finish in the Big 12 and 14th-place in the NCAA in 2013 and after the season Holder fired McGraw.
McGraw knew what he was getting into when he told the job and he acknowledged he let the program down.
“We didn’t play any good,” McGraw admitted after he was fired. “We didn’t coach any good, either. We had a lot of disappointing tournaments where I thought we underachieved as players and coaches and you must do better than that and we just didn’t.”
Holder hired Alan Bratton moving him over from coaching the Cowgirls. The former four-time All-American as an OSU golfer, two of those years a first-team All-American, Bratton has coached Oklahoma State to seven Big 12 crowns and the program’s 10th NCAA Championship. This past season the Cowboys bowed out of the NCAA with a semifinal loss to eventual champion Pepperdine.
Holder’s most recent golf hire in Greg Robertson as women’s coach has worked out well as the Cowgirls lost in the NCAA Championship match to Ole Miss as part of one of the best season’s in program history.
Holder can hire golf coaches, that makes sense.
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Kenny Gajewski is possibly Holder’s most successful hire.
Overall, Holder has primarily made strong hires. He is 50/50 in softball having hired Rich Wieligman, who had to be fired after nine seasons. Holder replaced him with Kenny Gajewski and what a hire that has been. Gajewski is a rock star among college coaches and has now taken the Cowgirls to back-to-back Women’s College World Series.
In baseball Holder kind of did a two-for-one deal. The top two candidates were both Gary Ward Oklahoma State baseball alums in Oral Roberts head coach Rob Walton and Vanderbilt assistant Josh Holliday. Holder hired the younger Holliday to be head coach and then convinced Holliday to bring in Rob Walton to coach pitchers. The Cowboys have been to the NCAA each season with that leadership and made it to the College World Series in 2016.
Holder made ultra-successful hires in tennis with Chris Young, who coaches the women and serves as the assistant athletic director for tennis. He hired Dave Smith, first to head up cross country and then had him add track and field. He approved of the switch when Colin Carmichael took over as soccer head coach and Karen Hancock became an assistant coach and senior women’s administrator for the department.
All of those moves worked, actually worked very well. Facing the traumatic disaster in 2011 of losing popular head coach Kurt Budke and women’s basketball assistant Miranda Serna in a deadly plane crash, Holder promoted assistant head coach Jim Littell. All Littell did was win 200 plus games his first five seasons including winning the WNIT Championship that first season where he took over in late November.
Men’s basketball was more interesting as Holder first hired Travis Ford from UMass. Ford took Oklahoma State to the NCAA in his first season and won the first-round game over Tennessee. Holder feeling pressure as schools such as Georgia threatened to hire Ford away, rewarded Ford with a lengthy contract featuring a huge buyout and a salary topping head football coach Mike Gundy. Things got sideways in a hurry and Gundy, who by that point had built Cowboy football into a top 15 program, hired Nick Saban’s agent Jimmy Sexton to represent him.
It was the first real friction between Gundy and Holder.
It was just the first of Holder’s miscues with basketball. After the 2015-16 basketball season and a 12-20 record he had to fire Ford and Holder’s hire looked very promising as Brad Underwood looked like the real deal following a big NCAA Tournament including a win over third-seed West Virginia while coaching Stephen F. Austin. Underwood came in and took the Cowboys in his first season to a 20-13 record and a nail biter in the first-round loss to Michigan.
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Underwood had a wild one season as OSU head coach.
Holder was given direction by the Board of Regents to make Underwood a new contract to keep him in Stillwater. Instead, Holder lowballed the instructed offer and Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman, looking for a coach, trailed the Cowboys team flight home on his private plane. By that evening Whitman had Underwood modeling an Illini pullover and signed as the new head coach of the illini.
That led to the coaching hire that will eventually become Holder’s legacy either positively or negatively. He surprised everybody, including the regents, who were still disappointed in losing Underwood, and before much of a search could take place, Holder hired Underwood assistant Mike Boynton, Jr. It was an out of leftfield hire that raised eyebrows across the Big 12 and across the nation.
The last four years have been a roller coaster ride ranging from good character teams to a team that nearly didn’t have enough scholarship players to play.
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Mike Boynton has steadied the program in his four years so far.
The first season Boynton took the undermanned Pokes to the third round of the NIT. The second season was a season full of players being dismissed as eight players were dismissed by Boynton since he had taken over in 2017. The team had just a few scholarship players left including Lindy Waters, Cameron McGriff, and Thomas Dziagwa and popular walk-on Trey Reeves.
The COVID-19 shortened 2019-20 season did feature a Big 12 Tournament opening win over Iowa State, but the Cowboys were likely heading toward the NIT.
This past season featured the sensational play of All-American and soon-to-be top NBA Draft selection Cade Cunningham as Oklahoma State beat Liberty in the first round of the NCAA Tournament before bowing out in the second round to Oregon State.
The future is on it’s way to being written as Boynton has a career mark of 72-58 through his first four seasons.
Overall, Mike Holder has had a plus mark in hiring coaches as athletic director at Oklahoma State.
