Inside the Mike Gundy-Oklahoma State divorce: ‘It doesn’t seem Mike adapted well’

A plane full of dejected Oklahoma State University donors, administrators and regents returned to Stillwater, Okla., a day after the football team’s 69-3 shellacking Sept. 6 at Oregon.

The weekend soiree, hosted by athletic director Chad Weiberg and new university president Dr. Jim Hess, provided a chance to wine and dine some of the program’s loyal and deep-pocketed supporters. Mike Gundy’s Cowboys were a long shot to win — they were a 28.5-point underdog against a top-10 opponent — but the stakeholders weren’t expecting their team to get torn to ribbons in such dominant fashion, either.

Prominent donors were already on the sideline, unhappy with the direction of the program in its 21st season under Gundy. An Oklahoma State alum and living legend, Gundy had been relegated to a restructured contract and a still smoldering seat following a standoff with the administration last winter. He was coming off a career-worst 3-9 season in 2024, which also included Gundy making disparaging comments about the fan base. For many of those still willing to make the trek to the Pacific Northwest, the loss was a death rattle.

Donor chatter about Gundy’s job status intensified after the trip, according to people briefed on the conversations, granted anonymity, like some others interviewed for this story, so they could speak frankly. It became a matter of when, not if, Oklahoma State would move on from Gundy.

Then the Cowboys lost to Tulsa.

The 19-12 defeat last week was Oklahoma State’s first home loss to the in-state Golden Hurricane since 1951, dropping the Pokes to 1-2. In many ways, it was a more embarrassing result than the 66-point loss at Oregon. Gundy was booed off the field by the home crowd.

Amid an unsalvageable situation, Weiberg said it was time to make the decision. He met with Gundy on Tuesday morning, and the university announced a few hours later that it had parted ways with its head football coach, effective immediately.

“It is in the best interest of OSU to start the process of identifying the next head coach of Cowboy football,” Weiberg said.

There was a sense after the loss to Oregon that Gundy had earned the right to finish the season and perhaps could reach an agreement with the university that allowed him to bow out amicably while celebrating his legacy as the program’s winningest coach by more than 100 games. Weiberg said that option was not discussed when the two met Tuesday, on the heels of the loss to Tulsa.

The results on the field overruled the complications: Gundy’s $15 million buyout, increased uncertainty at the AD position after Weiberg fought to retain Gundy last offseason, and the possibility that players could decide to transfer en masse.

A season that started with Gundy on the thinnest of ice collapsed almost immediately. But the cracks have been forming for some time.

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Gundy, 58, built his alma mater into a perennial Big 12 contender without a boatload of blue-chip prospects.

Before he took over in 2005, the Cowboys had only three 10-win seasons and seven AP Top 25 finishes in their history. Gundy added eight 10-win seasons and 10 more Top 25 finishes in his 21-year run, with the Cowboys enjoying 18 consecutive winning seasons on the backs of recruiting classes that routinely ranked outside the top 20 nationally.

But the introduction of name, image and likeness compensation in 2021 fundamentally changed player acquisition. It wasn’t long before programs aggressively used NIL money to attract high school prospects or transfers. Some, like Miami, Ole Miss, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Texas A&M, were early adopters. Gundy and Oklahoma State were not. It showed in high school recruiting, where the Cowboys’ past three classes each ranked lower than 50th nationally.

“It doesn’t seem Mike adapted well,” said one program source. “In some ways, I don’t blame him, but it appears to have greatly damaged the program.”

Gundy never seemed fully comfortable with the idea of paying players and utilizing the transfer portal, topics he has opined on plenty over the past few seasons, including during a news conference the day before his firing.

“This is really not the old college football,” he said. “This is a paid game. Whether I agree with it or not makes zero difference. It’s like being in an argument with your wife and you know you’re right — makes zero difference. You’re wrong. You might as well get over it, give in, and things are going to be much smoother.”

From 2008 to 2022, the program’s average national recruiting ranking was 34th, according to the 247Sports Composite. The nucleus of the roster was built on three-star prospects whom Gundy and his staff identified and developed into stars.

From 2015 to 2019, the Cowboys ranked in the 30s nationally in the 247Sports Team Talent Composite, which ranks accumulated roster talent. They haven’t been higher than 40th since 2020, were in the 50s in 2023 and 2024 and rank 49th this year.

“They haven’t been in the business of big-game hunting,” said Gabe Brooks, a scouting analyst for 247Sports. “They simply took too many reaches for far too many cycles.”

Like most schools, Oklahoma State had an NIL collective, Pokes with a Purpose, which has been sunset, but industry sources indicated that the Cowboys were behind the curve in compensating players at market value until this past offseason.

“They were slow,” said an NIL agent who has more than 40 college clients. “They weren’t spending like the top programs.”

Gundy acknowledged the financial gap when discussing roster budgets on his radio show, days before the Cowboys traveled to Oregon.

“I guess that the last three years we spent around $7 million,” he said Sept. 1. “I think Oregon spent close to $40 (million) last year alone. That was just one year. Now, I might be off a few million, but they’re spending a lot of money.”

Last season’s national champion, Ohio State, spent $20 million on its roster, according to athletic director Ross Bjork. Ole Miss, which missed the College Football Playoff last season, spent $10 million. This year, Texas Tech is spending $25 million. Even before the House v. NCAA settlement, which allows schools to directly pay athletes via revenue sharing, it wasn’t unusual for top-tier programs to have eight-figure roster budgets, though it wasn’t quite the norm.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said in response to Gundy’s comments. “We spend to win. Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t.”

Former Oklahoma State quarterback Alan Bowman connected with Miles Jordan, an agent and founder of Jordan Sports Group, late in the 2023 season while Bowman was helping lead the Cowboys to a 10-4 record and an appearance in the Big 12 Championship Game.

Bowman’s NIL contract with the collective, which ran from June 2023 to June 2024, paid him roughly one-tenth of the typical market value for a Power 4 starting quarterback, according to Jordan. Pokes with a Purpose promised to “take care” of Bowman after the season, since he would be a returning starter, Jordan said.

Collectives typically do not publicize NIL contracts, but Power 4 starting quarterbacks’ compensation in 2024 was generally believed to range between the low-to-mid six figures to more than $1 million for top-end QBs, according to two FBS personnel directors. Jordan said he believed Bowman could have made $300,000 to $500,000 on the open market in 2024.

When Bowman received his contract offer in July 2024, it was the same offer as the previous year, with no raise, according to Jordan. Bowman signed with Jordan, who said he proposed ideas to the collective to increase the quarterback’s NIL compensation, including hosting a raffle for fans to win a dinner with Bowman or to ride with him on the team plane to a road game.

“They said, ‘We’re not interested. … The deal’s the deal,’” Jordan said.

The transfer portal had closed. Bowman feared holding out would hurt his professional prospects. So he accepted the deal, though Jordan continued to ask the collective to improve it. Soon thereafter, Gundy addressed NIL deals during a post-practice interview session with local reporters.

“Portal’s over. All negotiation’s history. Now we’re playing football,” Gundy said in August 2024. “Tell your agent to quit calling us and asking for more money.”

An Oklahoma State source and a collective source, refuted Jordan’s account of the negotiations and said Bowman’s total compensation from the collective was believed to be roughly $100,000 and that Bowman did receive a raise for the 2024 season. The Oklahoma State source also noted that the team lost two starters at other positions from the Fiesta Bowl-winning team to other programs for $50,000 each. The source said that indicated the market wasn’t as lucrative as Jordan claimed. But the departures also underscored OSU’s difficulty in retaining key players on a budget.

Jordan provided The Athletic with a copy of Bowman’s term sheet with the collective, which showed Bowman’s compensation to be roughly a third of what the Oklahoma State and collective sources claimed. But Bowman also had a separate marketing agent, Jordan noted, and it’s unclear how much the quarterback earned from deals not negotiated by him.

Bowman started Oklahoma State’s first three 2024 games before he was benched in the Cowboys’ Big 12 opener versus Utah for Garret Rangel. Bowman returned to the starting lineup in October when Rangel was injured.

Oklahoma State, a trendy pick to return to the 2024 Big 12 title game, plummeted from 7-2 in conference games in 2023 to winless in the league last season. After that, Gundy and his staff became more aggressive in paying players. With revenue sharing on the way via the House settlement, schools could allot up to $20.5 million to pay athletes across the athletic department.

Oklahoma State is believed to be funding at the full revenue-sharing cap. Most Power 4 programs are devoting between $13 million and $15 million of that to their football rosters, though the top programs added more through front-loaded contracts before the cap went into effect and by facilitating third-party deals.

The anonymous NIL agent said the Cowboys were “very competitive” in the transfer portal this offseason. They paid in the upper six figures for their quarterback, TCU transfer Hauss Hejny, and for an offensive tackle, Appalachian State transfer Markell Samuel, according to two sources briefed on the moves.

But the reluctance to evolve in prior years hollowed out a roster that has scored a combined 15 points against its past three FBS opponents.

“They’re just behind,” the NIL agent said. “They don’t have the depth of some of these programs that have been reloading in the portal the last couple of years.”

Struggling to keep pace in spending served as a stark contrast to the early days of the Gundy era. Oklahoma State thrived in the late 2000s and early 2010s with the help of T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oilman and OSU benefactor who earmarked some of the $650 million he donated to the university to athletics, including a $165 million donation in 2006 for the football stadium that bears his name. The Cowboys enjoyed facilities advantages in recruiting as a result, but in the NIL era, player compensation has become more critical.

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This is how it falls apart.

A radically changing sport. A proud and stubborn coach, either unable or unwilling to adapt.

It didn’t help that Oklahoma State has been an administrative mess of late. At least a faction of the university’s board of regents took aim at Gundy last winter, seemingly at odds with Weiberg and then-president Dr. Kayse Shrum. A few months later, Shrum abruptly resigned following an audit of state funding, denying any knowledge of wrongdoing, and the same board of regents hired an outside PR firm to provide “crisis communications support.”

Weiberg has also been working without a contract since his previous deal expired at the end of June, prompting ongoing speculation about his own job security. At the Tuesday news conference on Gundy’s firing, Weiberg was asked about reports that he has a new contract in place.

“We’re not here to talk about my deal,” he said. “No, that is not something that is completed and something I’m not worried about at this time.”

ESPN reported that Weiberg is expected to sign a four-year contract extension with a raise from his $750,000 salary, and Weiberg said Tuesday that he will lead the hiring search for the next football coach.

All of this comes against the backdrop of new financial burdens in power-conference athletics. A school like Oklahoma State, which has consistently punched above its budgetary weight class, can’t afford to fall off a competitive cliff in its highest-profile and most lucrative sport. Or to have those pulling the purse strings tugging in different directions.

“This (decision) is about the bigger picture,” Weiberg said Tuesday. “Absolutely, our donors and our fans are critically important. That’s true all the time. And it’s more important now than it has ever been.”

After losing Friday to Tulsa, Gundy conducted his weekly news conference and local radio show on Monday, the day before his firing and just five days before the team’s next game, this Saturday at home against Baylor.

But ultimately, it became too costly not to fire Gundy, even with a $15 million buyout and 21-year history.

“This was not something that I thought we would be doing today,” Weiberg said. “I just wanted to make sure that we were able to handle all of that the right way, and that takes time.”

Fan support at Oklahoma State is still strong. Despite getting blown out at Oregon, the Pokes were roughly 3,300 short of a sellout for the Tulsa game. Last season, the school sold out every home game for the second consecutive season.

“This is a place you can win football games. Coach Gundy has proven that,” Weiberg said. “But there are things about the game that (have) changed, so I want to hear what the vision is from any of our candidates of how they would approach that.”

Gundy is and will forever be a legend at Oklahoma State, despite a few notable bumps along the way. He will likely have a statue outside Boone Pickens Stadium one day.

What’s next for Gundy remains to be seen, though he told The Athletic this summer that he wasn’t ready to retire, even if that meant having to coach somewhere other than OSU.

That long, decorated tenure ended without fanfare on a Tuesday afternoon, after 11 straight losses to FBS opponents — the last few in historically disappointing fashion — and a painstaking decision that became impossible not to make.

“When I was hired here to take this job, ever since that day, I’ve put my heart and soul into this, and I will continue to do that until, at some point, if I say I don’t want to do it,” Gundy said Monday. “Or if somebody else says we don’t want you to do it.”

(Top photo: Robin Alam / ISI Photos via Getty Images)