OSU coordinator hire: Was timetable clock broken?
Published: 2/8/2013 4:48 PM
Last Modified: 2/8/2013 4:48 PM
During a signing day press conference, Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was asked for a timetable on when he would hire a new offensive coordinator. He first said he expected to make a hire in early March, then he corrected himself and said the hire could come within a week to 10 days.
Instead, the hire was announced when I was winning a wrestling match with an omelette the next morning.
Do I feel suckered that the hire came so quickly? Not a bit.
This sort of thing has happened before during the Gundy regime and it’s not so much that he enjoys steering questioners down a stray path (though I do wonder sometimes if there is gamesmanship involved, never mind that no one else is playing or even knows what the game is). I just think Gundy doesn’t like talking about (or providing full disclosure on) some subjects, so he says whatever will allow him to escape press conferences without taking a surplus of questions about those topics.
That’s sort of what happened when Gundy declared at midseason that quarterback J.W. Walsh out for the the rest of the year. Because of the combo of a knee injury and rehab and shaking off rust, Gundy assumed it was unlikely Walsh would be back to par in 2012. So, Gundy took a shortcut and speculated, probably fairly, that Walsh was out for the season. Walsh, of course, got in the rehab express lane and returned to duty in a role as OSU’s No. 2 quarterback. In the meanwhile, Gundy didn’t get any “how is Walsh?” questions because there was no reason to expect Walsh to be in the thick of things.
Who’s going to call plays and coach quarterbacks in the Heart of Dallas Bowl? At the first pre-bowl press conference after Todd Monken’s departure, Gundy answered those questions by saying those things were going to be determined and they would be handled by a group of people. You can bet he knew more about those things than he was willing to say, for whatever reason.
Gundy is good about huddling with beat reporters after press conferences (this doesn’t happen everywhere) and providing tidbits that he might not want to say in front of live microphones, but otherwise is protective of his time and is mostly off-limits between press conferences.
A big exception came when he let me ride with him from Stillwater to Tulsa last year for a Cowboy Caravan tour stop. The during-the-car-ride interview was the basis for a “63 stories about Mike Gundy” piece that I wrote after Gundy won a 63rd game and became his alma mater’s winningest football coach. The highlight of that trip was watching the “real” Gundy buy billiards equipment for one of his sons at Amini’s Galleria and, on the way out the door, he promised his children he would teach them how to play the video game Donkey Kong.
Speaking of the 1980s, let’s go back to the future: After the signing day press conference, Gundy said he was farther along in the coordinator search than what people thought and ‘fessed up that he wished the coordinator topic hadn’t even come up because he didn’t want umpteen questions about it. He said he needed to return a couple of calls in regard to the coordinator issue. Maybe one of those calls was the magic one that resulted in a speedier-than-projected hire.
I’ve already got about a dozen questions about new coordinator Mike Yurcich because it seems to be an interesting hire. Hopefully, I won’t have to wait for the start of spring drills to ask them. Like Gundy, I don’t care much for time-consuming jibber jabber. But, if it’s inevitable, let’s get it out of the way and talk about spring in the spring.
Written by
Jimmie Tramel
Sports Writer
