STILLWATER – Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy when asked said he did not stay up and watch the Cowboys next opponent Kansas State come unraveled at Brigham Young. The Wildcats had control of the game but the last four minutes or so of the second quarter and the first five minutes of the second half were a disaster. Bad decisions, weird breaks going the other way caused the score to go from 6-0 K-State to 31-6 BYU. The Cougars beat K-State 38-6.
"There’s some similarities in their game and ours. We just came unraveled a little earlier,” Gundy said. “I’ve seen the game, but I didn’t watch the TV version.”
Gundy gets his sleep and tries to clear his mind, win or lose. You see he beats the office back to the coaches level of the West End Zone. Sometimes he goes back late that night, but usually it’s around 4-4:30 Saturday morning.
"I'm not one of the fan's favorites on Sunday's. So..."
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Gundy has been busy in games this season.
Gundy has been known to critique some on the headsets during the game. He will tell one of his coordinators, Kasey Dunn on offense, Bryan Nardo on defense, or now Sean Snyder on special teams if he wants something done differently. That is his job. Gundy is playing along with his staff every step of the way through the game, but he does a complete review during his late hours Saturday or early hours Sunday.
"You're exactly right. What you're saying is — there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacks all over the state in the professional business world, and I'm a Sunday morning quarterback in our own office,” Gundy said of the fans that typically call my radio show on Mondays and may have a rant or they may think they have a solution. Sometimes, maybe they do. It is Gundy that gets to implement that with his coaches on Sundays.
“So all the people that work in our building hate to see me come walking down the hallway on Sunday's, because I'm the worst when it comes to that,” Gundy said of telling his staff what went wrong with their plans and what needs to be done.
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Some of the problems running are offensive line, some are the running backs like Gordon. Both need to get better and in sync.
I couldn’t help it when I watched the first offensive call of the day, an outside zone that running back Ollie Gordon II jumped in the wrong hole (A gap) and just on the other side of center Joe Michalski was a six-yard hole that Gordon might have gone through and completed a 75-yard touchdown. Gundy saw that and a lot more.
“Oh, I don’t know if any of it is simple enough. If we were averaging over four yards a carry, I don’t think we’d have as many discussions as we’re having,” Gundy said. “Sometimes when you do it and you end up really getting particular to start looking for a lot of things that you could probably find last year, you just didn’t look because at the end of the game we’d have like 160 yards rushing. You guys might not know it, but we’re averaging 3.3 or 3.4 yards a carry now, so we’re almost a full yard up from where we were two weeks ago. But, it’s still not good enough and effective enough versus the extra people in the box that we want it to be.
“We have to throw the ball better than we did two days ago if people are gonna play the way they played us, which they very well could,” added Gundy. “We knew the last game that they were gonna play that way, that’s how they play everybody. We knew that going in.”
This week will be another to work on advancing the run offense back to what it was a season ago. You will have another team that will do what they do. Kansas State is a 3-3-5 defense and they are pretty stuck on having six in the box, sometimes five and occasionally seven.
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Jeff Roberson (22) and Trey Rucker (9), nation’s leading tackler both needed to get IVs in the second half.
Meanwhile, the Oklahoma State defense defended 81-plays during Utah’s possession time of a whopping 42:26. Utah had the football nearly three-quarters of the game. Some players like linebacker Nick Martin played most of those plays. Linebacker Jeff Roberson and safety Trey Rucker, you know 14 tackles and two interceptions in the game Rucker had to go to the locker room midway through the second half and get fluids through an IV.
Colorado is not practicing two-way player Travis Hunter three days a week, so does Gundy feel he’ll have to do something special to help his defenders recover physically?
“They were on there 42 minutes which is 70% of the game, but the temperature change this week will help with some of that and it also still relatively early in the season,” Gundy answered. “Now, the difficult side is we’ve been practicing since July 31st. Usually by now we’ve had a break and we haven’t had that. So the temperatures are going to allow us, me to schedule practice as is. And I’ll be real honest with you, they held up really well. Rucker had to get IV’d. And somebody else (Roberson).”
“Everybody else did pretty well,” Gundy continued. “So we don’t really have to adjust as much if we were going to get another week of 95 and 100 degree weather, then we would have to look at it, but I feel they are doing okay.”
I’m not saying that Mike Gundy will need to micro manage but the run offense needs to get back and average over 4.0-yards a game, the quarterback (Alan Bowman) need to complete at least 60 percent of passes and preferably more. A defense that struggled earlyis getting better but needs some complimentary football to maintain.
