When learning to write about an athlete in a context far beyond game nights, journalism students or aspiring writers could find a far worse example than John McPhee’s profile of legendary college basketball star Bill Bradley.
McPhee’s book, “A Sense Of Where You Are: Bill Bradley At Princeton,” set a very high standard for profiles of athletes. The fact that Bradley represented such a rich and interesting subject did not hurt McPhee — scoring 58 points in the third-place game of the 1965 Final Four is hardly one of the five or six most interesting things about Bradley the person (though in 1965, it might have cracked the top three). Nevertheless, McPhee did well in conveying to readers a life in all its contexts. This wasn’t just analysis of Bradley as a scoring machine, the last great Ivy League basketball megastar. This was an exploration of a world, a mind, an impressive person setting forth on a journey that would lead to Oxford, NBA championships, the United States Senate, and a noble but failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, among many other things.
It’s that specific notion of capturing a life in context — not just on the surface — which resonates in relationship to the life of Oklahoma State football.
It’s not easy to gain a sense of where the Cowboys are — not just on a national level, but in the Big 12 itself. The uncertainty pervading the Oklahoma State program is rooted in this outburst:
Yet, one can’t just look at that root, but at the branches that have grown in Stillwater, Okla., ever since.
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“I’m a man, I’m 40!” is significant not so much for any inspirational value it might have contained then, or might retain now. The enduring importance of that tirade by head coach Mike Gundy is that he viewed himself as a target and felt the need to lash out at his critics. An underlying acknowledgment of the pressure attached to the Oklahoma State job was part of that outpouring. One could quite reasonably say that Gundy, as an alumnus of the school, felt a very personal sense of responsibility for the program, and that a strong love of the university led him to do what he did on that afternoon.
However, if we’re here to portray a football program in a larger context — the way John McPhee would have done — it wasn’t just his history with the school which made Mike Gundy passionate. It was money, whether one cares to admit it or not.
The 21st century for Oklahoma State athletics has been marked by the emergence of T. Boone Pickens as its most central benefactor. Pickens began to heavily invest in OSU sports in 2002, according to this account. In 2005 (as the linked article reports), he gave $165 million to OSU athletics. Despite the fact that Oklahoma State football has regularly been Little Brother to the Oklahoma Sooners in the Bedlam rivalry, and has usually had to stand in line behind Kansas in basketball (though not always — the Cowboys are the last non-Kansas team to win the league outright, in 2004), this infusion of resources into the program changed attitudes and expectations. Big money will always do that.
Gundy was in his third season of a full-fledged rebuilding project when “I’m a man!” occurred. He had time, but he also faced the elevated pressure which accompanies major money. From a detached football observer’s perspective, Oklahoma State should not have been expected to join or surpass the Sooners on the Big 12 mountaintop; merely getting close to the standard set by Bob Stoops would have rated — from that distant vantage point in 2007 — as a considerable achievement.
Gundy surpassed those expectations. Oklahoma State didn’t just make life difficult for OU; it throttled the Sooners on a cold late-autumn night in 2011 to win a first Big 12 title. The Cowboys — jobbed in a big way by the BCS system in 2011 — did not get the national title game berth they deserved, but they did turn back Stanford in a thrilling Fiesta Bowl. A top-three finish in 2011 put the program on a pedestal, exactly where Pickens wanted it to be and where Gundy always dreamed it could go.
The big donor’s money kept rolling in. The coach kept improving the product. The summit view proved to be satisfying beyond words for the very same program that had endured two different aviation accidents in the 21st century. Oklahoma State had lived in the shadows of superior programs, and had endured a pain beyond description.
If you were to say that OSU sports — football in particular — had become a very different entity in January of 2012, you would have had ample reason to offer such a statement. Mike Gundy had built something substantial, and he gave every appearance that he would sustain it.
This leads us to the next important moment in the history of Oklahoma State football. It’s a moment Gundy would like to forget, but it’s a moment he hopes he can overcome.
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Unlike 2011, the 2013 regular-season finale matching Oklahoma State and Oklahoma in Boone Pickens Stadium was not played at night. Like 2011, though, the Cowboys were expected to win — maybe not in blowout fashion, but certainly by a large percentage of prognosticators.
Oklahoma was playing for a BCS bowl berth, but the fact remained that the Sooners could not win the Big 12 for yet another season. Kept out of that winner’s circle since 2010, the Sooners were a damaged program in search of a conquest that could re-ignite them. Oklahoma State, on the other hand, was gunning for a second Big 12 crown in three seasons. With a victory over OU, the Cowboys — certainly in the context of the current decade — would have stamped themselves as Big Brother and relegated the Sooners to the role of Little Bro.
The turnabout in fortunes expected to occur in Stillwater was delicious for Cowboy fans who had to put up with the Crimson and Cream goliath for decades. One Big 12 title was its own personal satisfaction, but two in three years would have represented an emphatic statement not just of a Cowboy consolidation of power, but Sooner slippage. Oklahoma State enhanced itself in 2011; a follow-up in 2013 would have rated both as a self-enhancement and a damaging act toward the hated foe from Norman.
It was all set up for Oklahoma State: A world of new expectations was about to witness another Big 12 title in relatively short order. All the resources devoted to Cowboy football were about to pay off — literally and handsomely. The team just needed to play 60 solid minutes against its Bedlam rival.
Then came the thunderbolt: The Cowboys fell short.
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Some games are won by the winner, and others were lost by the loser. It was fair to give Oklahoma a lot of credit for its resilience on that cold and gray day two years ago, but a brutally honest appraisal of the 2013 edition of Bedlam would contend that Oklahoma State lost the game more than the Sooners won it.
Oklahoma’s offense was not a portrait of efficiency that afternoon. The Sooners completed under 50 percent of their passes (16 of 33) and converted only 2 of 15 third downs. The Sooners and Stoops ping-ponged among three different quarterbacks — Kendal Thompson, Trevor Knight, and Blake Bell — a sign of their lack of clear answers on that side of the ball. This was a team that should have been taken, much as the 2011 Sooners were taken behind the woodshed in Stillwater. Yet, the 2013 Cowboys froze in the cold. Unable to finish drives just as the Sooners were, the Cowboys left the door open, and although Bell was not expected to lead a game-winning touchdown march in the final two minutes, the author of the “Belldozer” did at least have a chance.
He made the most of it, in what should stand as the finest moment of his collegiate career.
Bell threw a seven-yard touchdown pass to Jalen Saunders with 19 seconds to go, and just like that, Oklahoma State’s dreams of affirming its superiority over Little Brother evaporated. Baylor — long a member of both the Big 12 and college football underclass — won its first league title, and its first conference championship since the 1980 Southwest Conference. Oklahoma didn’t rule the roost in its conference, but it still held sway in its home state.
“I’m a Man!” raised questions about Oklahoma State’s place in the Big 12, but in a forward-looking and hopeful way. The 2013 Bedlam loss raised questions about OSU’s place in the world, but in a negative way based on a glimpse into the recent past. This is why it’s so hard to ascertain where Oklahoma State is — and should be — as the 2015 season arrives.
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Baylor, of course, backed up its 2013 league title with another one in 2014. TCU, a goliath in the 1930s but a longstanding member of the lower classes in the next several decades, found life in the Big 12 to be very difficult at first. However, the breakthrough by last year’s team immediately transformed the Horned Frogs, internally and externally. Baylor and TCU are now big-hitters, and Oklahoma is the outsider, stripped of the air of invincibility it cultivated in the first decade of this century.
Where, pray tell, does this leave Oklahoma State?
Should the Cowboys expect to be in the top tier of the league? Hey, if Baylor and TCU are there, shouldn’t OSU be there as well? On the other hand, Oklahoma State has already achieved a lot more under Mike Gundy than many had a right to expect back when “I’m a Man!” first hit the college football community at full force. Gundy has, in a sense, already triumphed over his critics. Would the failure to win a second Big 12 title really change his legacy in a profound (and profoundly negative) way?
Maybe those questions are separate beasts, and shouldn’t be lumped together. However, the very reality that you’ll get a split verdict on the matter is precisely what underscores a sense of where Oklahoma State is: an uncertain place.
John McPhee would agree.
