STILLWATER, Okla. — Earlier this month, Oklahoma State athletic officials, regents and donors took a chartered flight to Oregon for the Cowboys’ Week 2 game against the Ducks.
The trip’s purpose went beyond watching the game. The group of roughly 50 visited Nike’s headquarters and toured a winery founded by an Oklahoma State alum in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. But OSU’s power brokers also wanted to see for themselves what it would take to compete against the very best in college football’s revenue-sharing era.
The game itself would reveal just how far the Cowboys had fallen in a little over a year under their legendary head coach. In a 69-3 beatdown, the Ducks handed OSU its worst loss since Nov. 8, 1907 — days before Oklahoma gained statehood.
The charter flight back to Stillwater was somber. Nobody, at least loudly or openly, called for the head coach to go. But to some, that sentiment felt palpable.
“I think there was a faction of people that just wanted to see change,” said one OSU source. “Oregon helped that for some of them. Tulsa helped them even more.”
Two weeks later came the biggest gut punch. The Golden Hurricane beat the Cowboys in Stillwater for the first time since 1951, controlling the game on six days’ rest while OSU came off a bye.
On Tuesday, the school finally made a move that would’ve been unthinkable only two years ago — when the Cowboys played in the Big 12 title game — but lately had seemed inevitable following 11 straight losses to FBS opponents.
Three games into his 21st season, OSU fired Mike Gundy.
“We all have high expectations for OSU football because of Mike Gundy,” athletic director Chad Weiberg said. “Unfortunately, the results of the last year have not met the standard.”
Gundy had spent 35 years at OSU. Four as a quarterback. Ten as an assistant. Twenty as head coach, with just two losing seasons — his first and his last. In between, Gundy delivered 18 consecutive winning seasons, tying Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops for fifth-most among FBS coaches since 1978, behind only Bobby Bowden, Frank Beamer, Mack Brown and Tom Osborne.
When OU and Texas bolted for the SEC ahead of the 2024 season, OSU seemed poised to rule a weaker Big 12. Instead, the Cowboys went 0-9 in league play last fall, culminating with a 52-0 loss at Colorado.
By the end of it, then-board chair Jimmy Harrel led an unsuccessful push to have Gundy fired last December, according to multiple OSU sources. The winningest coach in school history still had enough support to weather one bad season.
But that backing quickly dried up during the Oregon and Tulsa debacles. As one school source put it, if the Cowboys were going to get the outside financial support necessary to compete at the top of the sport, they had to make a change.
“We’re not the only school trying to win football games,” Weiberg said. “We’ve got to continue to step up and compete at the highest level if we want to win at the highest level.”
Interviews with several program sources recounted the week that resulted in one of the most pivotal decisions in school history — and why the coach who turned OSU into a perennial winner couldn’t hang on to his job any longer.
IN THE 104 seasons before Gundy took over in 2005, OSU reached double-digit wins three times. In two decades, Gundy led the Cowboys to eight 10-win seasons, turning OSU into a consistent winner and unapologetically putting the Cowboys on the map nationally at the same time.
He grew a mullet. He danced down to the floor in the locker room after big wins. And he delivered one of the most quotable lines in college football history — “I’m a man! I’m 40!”
Unlike OU and Texas, Gundy rarely landed top-25 recruiting classes.
But the Cowboys managed to compete with the Big 12 bluebloods by unearthing hidden gems, who later developed into standouts with the help of Rob Glass, one of the country’s most respected strength and conditioning coaches. Justin Blackmon and James Washington both arrived as two-star recruits. They each left with the Biletnikoff Award, given to college football’s most outstanding receiver.
“That’s always been our secret sauce,” said one program source. “We were really good at evaluating talent. Then you get them in with Rob Glass, and all of a sudden your two- or three-star guy becomes a four- or five-star player.”
In 2011, with that blueprint, OSU won its first outright conference title since the World War II era and finished third in the BCS rankings, narrowly missing out on reaching the national title game.
A decade later, the Cowboys came up just short at the goal line against Baylor in the Big 12 championship. With another yard, the Pokes likely would’ve advanced to the four-team College Football Playoff.
But OSU’s formula for success began to fray in college football’s money era. The kinds of players OSU previously developed began leaving for bigger paydays elsewhere.
For many years, the Cowboys boasted one of the biggest megadonors in college football history: Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who famously bankrolled OSU’s facilities with billions and financed the football stadium now bearing his name. But Pickens died in 2019, just before paying players became paramount and the decisive competitive edge.
Team sources said OSU spent just $7 million on its roster last season — $13 million less than Ohio State spent on the Buckeyes’ 2024 national championship team.
Money also intensified tension within the program. A week before the 2024 opener last August, Gundy complained about players asking for more money just before the season.
“Tell your agent to quit calling us,” he said then. “It’s non-negotiable now.”
Multiple OSU sources said that frustration was primarily directed at returning starting quarterback Alan Bowman and his representation.
After Bowman completed just 8 of 22 passes with an interception before halftime against Utah in Week 4, the seventh-year senior was benched for the second half of OSU’s Big 12-opening loss. The move, and the defeat, set the tone for what would ultimately become the worst season of Gundy’s career.
“It’s just amazing how quickly we slid down,” said an OSU source. “We really went into the [new] Big 12 thinking we’d be the leader of the pack, and it didn’t work that way. And I think Coach Gundy would admit he was late to the NIL game.”
Earlier in his tenure, Gundy had led OSU to improbable turnarounds following ugly early-season losses.
After falling to Central Michigan on a Hail Mary in 2016, the Cowboys rebounded to finish with 10 wins. In 2023, OSU bounced back from a dismal 33-7 loss to South Alabama to reach the Big 12 championship game as Gundy cruised to Big 12 Coach of the Year for a second time in three seasons.
But Gundy couldn’t orchestrate such a turnaround last year. In early November, after six straight losses, he created a local firestorm by suggesting negative fans “can’t pay their own bills.”
By December, after he fired his entire coaching staff, it was unclear if Gundy himself would return this fall. On Dec. 7, he reached an agreement with the regents to take a $1 million pay cut that went toward NIL; he also accepted a reduced buyout.