Thirty-five of Mike Gundy’s 58 years on Earth have been spent either playing for, or coaching at, his alma mater Oklahoma State.
The remaining years of his life will be spent doing anything other than that.
The school on Tuesday fired Gundy after a 1-2 start in a shocking in-season move that gets it out of the Mike Gundy business for good. Gundy, the second-longest tenured FBS head coach, had been at the helm of the program since 2005 and led it to its highest heights in history: a Big 12 title in 2011, eight seasons or 10 or more wins and an accumulation of 170 total victories across his two decades. Among active head coaches, he ranked third in wins at his current school. He steps away as OSU football’s winningest coach.
The program had just three 10-win seasons prior to his hiring as head coach in 2005 — and two of those seasons (1987 and 1988) came when he was the starting quarterback playing alongside Barry Sanders and Thurman Thomas in the same backfield.
Gundy has not just been synonymous with the program. He has been the program.
In 2005, Gundy took over a football team that was not just an afterthought in its own state — where it was well behind the University of Oklahoma — but also within its own walls. Prior to his tenure, thanks to the Eddie Sutton era, OSU was largely considered a basketball school that also had a football program with a rundown stadium and next to no winning infrastructure. Les Miles helped change that perception when he took over in 2001 (with Gundy serving as assistant head coach and offensive coordinator) but the program was largely unsuccessful and thus uninterested in committing resources to changing that trajectory.
That changed under Gundy and coincided with what will be known forever as the golden era of OSU football.
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T. Boone Pickens’ donations
In December 2005, 11 months after Gundy was tabbed as OSU’s head football coach, billionaire OSU alumnus T. Boone Pickens donated $165 million to the athletic program. It set a record for the largest single gift given to an NCAA program and came after he donated $70 million two years prior.
That inextricably tied Gundy and Pickens together as the Cowboys program rallied from a Big 12 afterthought to a Big 12 juggernaut.
OSU in Gundy’s first season went 4-7 — and turned out to be the start of a bowl streak that ran 18 seasons before crashing last year with an abysmal 3-9 campaign.
Pickens and Gundy often feuded over the years, the source of which owing to responsibility for unprecedented success in Stillwater on the gridiron (and Pickens’ displeasure with Gundy’s record against rival Oklahoma).
Pickens died six years ago this month, but his legacy as the school’s largest benefactor — and perhaps the driving force behind OSU football’s revival — lives on.
Bowl streak
OSU went 4-7 in Gundy’s first season as he laid the foundation for what was ahead. Nearly a dozen players were expelled from the team as a part of setting and changing the culture.
The following year OSU went 7-6 and made a bowl, which began a streak of 18 consecutive years of bowl eligibility, the longest such streak in program history.
That streak was imperiled on numerous occasions — most notably in 2014, when a burned-out Gundy entered the regular-season finale with a 5-6 record. But against rival Oklahoma, Tyreek Hill returned a magical punt for a score that culminated with a 38-35 overtime win over the Sooners, in the process breathing new life into Gundy and the program. They won their bowl game that season and launched into the Mason Rudolph era, which resulted in three subsequent 10-win seasons.
The bowl streak came to a crashing end last season after OSU opened the season 3-0 and lost its final nine games. It is now expected to start a new streak — one of a bowl drought — thanks to a 1-2 start. ESPN’s Football Power Index projects OSU to finish with just two wins and gives it just a 0.2% chance of reaching six wins.
Building a monster
The 2008 and 2009 seasons saw OSU win nine games — which it had only done once since the 1980s — and that propelled it to a new level in the college football universe. It won 11 games in 2010 and set up the Cowboys, led by quarterback Brandon Weeden and receiver Justin Blackmon, for a huge 2011 season.
Those lofty expectations were exceeded, as OSU went 12-1 and narrowly missed the BCS title game after a late-season loss to Iowa State. They won the Fiesta Bowl that postseason over Andrew Luck and Stanford.
The 2010s had plenty more good in store as OSU won 10 or more games in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017, and each year held conference title contention aspirations. Following a 7-6 2014 campaign, Gundy acknowledged to ESPN in an interview that expectations were not what they once were.
He had changed the trajectory for the better and was responsible for its successes while shouldering its failures.
“We have created this monster,” Gundy said in 2015. “Now we have to feed it.”
A promise to make change
In June 2020, amid the global pandemic and a racial awakening in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Gundy was photographed at a lake next to two of his sons wearing a One America News Network (OAN) shirt.
The photo spawned an outcry among among his players, who are largely Black, over its insensitivity and indifference because of how the far-right, pro-Donald Trump network handled the Black Lives Matter movement. All-American running back Chuba Hubbard threatened to boycott anything related to the school until things changed.
OSU formed a diversity council in the aftermath of that. Its conclusion was that Gundy was not racist, but rather insensitive and tone deaf.
Gundy called himself a dumbass for it and was hit with a $1 million pay cut after a two-week review of his program.
That saga ended with Hubbard and Gundy making nice on video.
“I’m looking forward to making some changes,” Gundy said. “It starts at the top with me.”
What those changes were remain unclear. Gundy demurred when asked about changes, and it’s unclear what, if any, oversight there was to ensure changes were applied.
A 2021 rally back to relevance
OSU finished 8-3 in 2020 after being picked second in the Big 12 preseason media poll. After a scandal-ridden summer, questions loomed over the future of the program.
Gundy rallied that offseason and mounted a 12-win season that ended inches shy of a Big 12 title and College Football Playoff berth.
Cracks showing
Some good and some not-so-good ensued in the following years. OSU went 7-6 in 2022. Then in 2023, it won 10 games again behind the prolific power running game attack spearheaded by star running back Ollie Gordon.
It was a brilliant campaign and another double-digit win season, which helped gloss over an ugly September home loss to South Alabama.
The next year was not as kind. In 2024, OSU stumbled to a 3-9 record, its worst season of the Gundy era. It lost its final 10 games after beating Tulsa in September. Gundy’s automatic-renewing deal was restructured earlier this year after that season to include another $1 million paycut.
Losing to Tulsa at home last weekend appears to have been the final straw. OSU looked lifeless against a program it has no business losing to, punctuating an ugly 0-2 September that began with a 69-3 defeat at Oregon. It was the program’s most lopsided loss since Nov. 9, 1907 — one week before Oklahoma became a state.
Constant public missteps
It wasn’t just Gundy’s attire that irked fans and players. His words delivered plenty of heartache internally and externally, too.
Before last season, after Gordon was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, Gundy downplayed the severity of it and admitted in front of cameras: “I’ve probably done that a thousand times in my life, and it was just fine.”
During the 2024 season, amid criticism coaching a team that went 0-9 in Big 12 play, Gundy further sowed grief among fans by saying that criticism about his team comes from people “who can’t pay their own bills.”
“In most cases, the people that are negative and voicing their opinions are the same ones that can’t pay their own bills,” he said. “They’re not taking care of themselves. They’re not taking care of their own family. They’re not taking care of their own job. But they have an obligation to speak out and complain about others because it makes them feel better. But then in the end, when they go to bed at night, they’re the same failure that they were before they said anything negative about anybody else.”
Gundy was forced to issue a public half-apology via a written statement in a backdoor-battle that caused consternation within the administration.
The irony of the end
Sporting his famous mullet and strolling along an ESPN reporter in 2017, Gundy cut loose talking about his donkey named Blackjack who has a “really bad attitude,” his love of hunting and his hair routine. (He’s a butch wax guy.)
That was a perfect encapsulation of the good Gundy: loose, funny and unafraid to say anything. It’s in part what made him one of the original viral stars after his famous “I’m a man, I’m 40” rant” in which he unleashed on a reporter while defending his quarterback in 2007.
Now the same coach famous for being loose is being let go in part for being too loose — and it comes 18 years and one day removed from that now-famous tirade.
