Gundy Wants Okla. St. to Stay Contender at BetLM

Gundy Wants Okla. St. to Stay Contender

OKLAHOMA CITY – Now that Okla­homa State has come so close to play­ing for the BCS cham­pi­onship, Mike Gundy is ask­ing for help to keep his team as one of col­lege football’s elite.

Gundy called on Okla­homa State’s admin­is­tra­tion and fans Tues­day to make a com­mit­ment now to keep the third-ranked Cow­boys as a promi­nent national pro­gram. OSU won a school-record 12 games this sea­son, claim­ing its first Big 12 cham­pi­onship and play­ing in and win­ning its first BCS bowl game.

A cou­ple good sea­sons aren’t enough, though. He wants his alma mater to have stay­ing power at the top.

“If we’re going to com­pete with Okla­homa and Texas and Nebraska and LSU and Alabama and Stan­ford and all these teams, then we need to do the same things that they’re doing,” Gundy said dur­ing a con­fer­ence call.

“We’ve been for­tu­nate. We’ve com­peted at a very high level the last two years but we’ve done it a lit­tle bit short-handed. We’re not going to always be able to do it short-handed. We have to have the same oppor­tu­ni­ties as every­body else.”

Gundy called for the com­ple­tion of an indoor prac­tice facil­ity and three grass prac­tice fields, which have been started years behind sched­ule across the street from Boone Pick­ens Sta­dium. He also called on fans to buy more sea­son tick­ets and rou­tinely sell out the sta­dium. Atten­dance was up this sea­son, but there still were no sell­outs at the 60,000-seat sta­dium– one of the smaller venues in the conference.

Gundy didn’t cam­paign for a raise, but he is quickly becom­ing under­paid com­pared to his Big 12 peers. He made less this sea­son than Kansas’ Turner Gill, who won only two games before get­ting fired. Now that the sea­son is over, he said he expects to start receiv­ing calls from other schools seek­ing his assis­tant coaches.

“It’s not just about Mike Gundy, the staff and the play­ers. It’s going to be the cul­ture of Okla­homa State foot­ball and there needs to be a com­mit­ment from every­body,” he said.

“We’re at a point now we have to make a deci­sion whether we want to be a big-time foot­ball school or not, and there’s just a lot of things involved. We’re in some uncharted waters here at Okla­homa State and I think there’s some deci­sions that have to be made by the pow­ers that be whether we want to be a big-time foot­ball school or not. If that’s so, then we need to con­tinue to move for­ward because I’m cer­tainly mak­ing a com­mit­ment. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Mike Gundy is com­mit­ted to Okla­homa State football.”

Gundy pointed out that Okla­homa State (12–1) “got as close as any­body this year– nine-one thou­sandths of a point, or what­ever it is– to hav­ing a chance to play for the whole thing.” There’s still an out­side chance that the Cow­boys, who fin­ished that frac­tion of a point behind Alabama for third in the BCS stand­ings, could get a split national cham­pi­onship if the Crim­son Tide beat Alabama in the BCS title game Mon­day night.

“If we get every­body on board, then we’ll have a chance to stay at this level. If we don’t get every­body on board, then you fall back in the ranks with every­body else,” Gundy said. “Because foot­ball is a big-time oper­a­tion, it takes a lot of work.”

“It just takes a lit­tle bit of slip-up, a short period of time where you’re some­what non­com­mit­tal, and you can fall to the bot­tom of the bar­rel really quick,” he added.

Gundy will have to try to keep Okla­homa State as a national title con­tender with­out the ser­vices of two-time All-American receiver Justin Black­mon and quar­ter­back Bran­don Wee­den, who has bro­ken numer­ous school pass­ing records. Black­mon announced after the 41–38 Fiesta Bowl win against Stan­ford that he was enter­ing the NFL draft as a junior.

The sit­u­a­tion is sim­i­lar to two years ago, when the Cow­boys lost NFL first-round draft picks Dez Bryant and Rus­sell Okung plus Zac Robin­son– who at the time held sev­eral of the records Wee­den would break– but unex­pect­edly went on to even greater suc­cess when Wee­den and Black­mon became stars almost out of nowhere.

“Quar­ter­back play is about lead­er­ship, about lead­ing the offense and find­ing a way for your team to rally around you. Bran­don has cer­tainly brought all that to our foot­ball team and now we have to find another one,” Gundy said. “We have some young guys in our pro­gram that have to earn the respect of the team as we move forward.

“We went through this with Josh Fields and then we had Zac Robin­son and then we had Bran­don Wee­den, so I fully expect for us to come up with some­body that will move our offense, score points and develop into a leader for our team.”

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more col­lege foot­ball news see: Gundy wants Okla. St. to stay con­tender .

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