Oklahoma State

The foundation was real. Boone Pickens poured half a billion dollars into Stillwater when the program was an afterthought, building facilities that matched any blue blood in the country at a land-grant school in rural Oklahoma. Gundy took that investment and built a 20-year run: eight wins a season, the 2011 Big 12 championship, a 12-1 Fiesta Bowl year and a No. 3 final ranking behind the best offense the program had ever fielded. Barry Sanders won the Heisman here in 1988 in the most statistically dominant college running back season on record. Oklahoma State built an identity around being distinct from the school 80 miles south — the cowboy mythology, Pistol Pete, the orange-out crowds in Stillwater — and for two decades it held.

The 2025 collapse erased that momentum in a single autumn. A 1-2 start became a 1-11 finish, a winless Big 12 record, and ten straight losses. Gundy was fired on September 23 — the end of the most important coaching tenure in program history arriving not with a ceremony but with a 1-2 record and a room that had stopped believing. Eric Morris, hired from North Texas in November, is the first sitting FBS head coach Stillwater has ever brought in, and the first since 1969 the Cowboys hired from another program at all. He inherited 85-plus portal additions and the task of rebuilding from a foundation that is still real, even if the 2025 season made it hard to see.

The 2026 season isn't a contention story; it's a credibility story, and the opener supplied an early answer. A 13-point favorite on the road, Oklahoma State lost to Tulsa 24-10 in Morris's debut — unable to separate from a Group of Five program picked to finish in the middle of the American. The question Morris has to answer first isn't whether Oklahoma State can return to the Big 12's top tier — it's whether the program's culture survived 2025 intact. Gundy's loyalists say the pieces are still there: the facilities are still world-class, the donor base is still there, the orange-out crowds will come back when the product does. The other room points to a 13-point road line blown by 14 points in Week 1 as early evidence the mark from 1-11 hasn't washed off, and that Morris is asking for patience a fanbase that watched its program's identity collapse in real time isn't sure it has left to give.