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BIG 12 CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYSJuly 15, 2019Mike GundyArlington, Texas THE MODERATOR: We are now joined by Oklahoma State Coach Mike Gundy. Coach, welcome and your thoughts on the upcoming season? MIKE GUNDY: I'm excited to be here for the 15th time, looking forward to starting with our team, enthusiastic group of young men who have worked hard over the last four to five months. We have had some time with the strength coaches over the last five weeks and our staff has finished up recruiting and has another week or so and anxious to get back to work. I'm excited about our football team and I'm excited about getting back out there and working the young men and getting ready to play a game. We all kind of sit around after March Madness and wait for college football in the state of Oklahoma. We're not far away. Our staff has been tremendous with the addition of a few new coaches. I'm excited about what they have brought to the table, the cohesiveness and chemistry we have with them and our recruiting office and the hard work they have put in over the last three or four months. I'm more excited and looking forward to a season than I ever have been before in a long, long time. So can't wait to get started. Q. Coach, last year with the new defensive coordinator, brought a lot of pressure, finished 10th nationally in sacks, but gave up 32 and a half points per game. Will the approach on defense change this year in year two to something more conservative or will you guys run it back and look for different results in a different area? MIKE GUNDY: Our system is going to stay the same. Hopefully we can play it better. We need to be a more disciplined defensive football team. I think Coach [Jim] Knowles' second year will give him a better feel for this league. It's different in our conference, the willingness of head coaches and offensive coordinators trying to score every play and I think Coach Knowles understands that maybe more so than last year. You kind of get into a groove in this league and figure it out, but we're going to run the same plays, hopefully we will be better at executing those plays. Q. Mike, last year Big 12 Media Day you dropped the news on us that Taylor [Cornelius] was your guy at quarterback. Where do you stand now on the quarterback situation and if you're not ready to name a starter, do you have a sense of timeline at this point? MIKE GUNDY: Whenever we're ready to name a starter based on him earning the job we'll do that. I think if you look back at my history we have named guys at times when people didn't think we were going to name a starter because we felt like they earned the job, gave our team the best chance to be successful and win games. Both guys on our team right now have worked hard. We haven't had anybody go ahead and take the reins at this pick point. So we're ready for them to split reps. If at any time one becomes our starter based on us feeling like they give us the best chance to win a football game we will name a starter. I would like to tell you that but I would be reaching. I do know this: Our team is confident in both young men. If neither one of them gives us any indication that they've taken the job prior to the first game, we will play both guys. I think that's fair. So at this particular time, we don't have anybody in place for that position, but we'll certainly be looking in August. Q. I'm asking coaches today about building a culture versus the mental need to win now and save your job. When you got to Oklahoma State, you had a very unique situation, you had to clean a lot of guys out. Talk about your mindset back in 2005 of needing to do that versus the balance of building a culture and winning now? MIKE GUNDY: I wasn't smart enough to realize how difficult it was to develop a culture and I never worried about winning now. I had great confidence in Coach [Mike] Holder, and in the people that were supporting me that if we did things the right way it would work out. I've said this many times before as I look back, if I would have realized how difficult it was to get to the position that we are today, I don't know if I would have been able to make some of the decisions that we feel like helped to establish a culture at Oklahoma State that's benefited us for a number of years. The win at all costs theory has never crossed my mind. That's not something personally I believe in. I believe in developing young men. I know at times there are coaches that might say that, but we back that up at Oklahoma State. We're in that business right now. We're trying to push young men out of our program and trying to make them the best people and the most prosperous in society and have a great four-year career. Q. Curious, what attributes drew you to Charlie Dickey to make him your new offensive line coach? MIKE GUNDY: I tried to hire Charlie a few times before, got close. He had great loyalty to Coach [Bill] Snyder at Kansas State for all the right reasons. The timing worked out perfect for us and for Charlie. I've said this, when our coach left I picked the phone up and about five minutes later and asked Charlie and he said he would take the job and we didn't have any other discussions and he showed up. It's been great for Coach and great for Oklahoma State. Q. Last year in your game Brock Purdy burst on to the Big 12 scene and national scene to a certain extent, literally just rising from the bench to do so. What was the thought process going on the sidelines when he came in? How much did you know about him going into the game and just your thoughts on how he played in that game in a place where Iowa State doesn't usually win? MIKE GUNDY: We didn't know anything about him. Certainly didn't expect for him to get into the game. I thought he played great and continued on and had a great season. I'm sure Coach [Campbell] would be able to talk more in that direction, but he's become a very good player in our conference and like the long history of the Big 12 we get tremendous quarterback play and he was very impressive as a young player. Q. Just want to ask, quarterback competition aside, what is hiring Sean Gleeson bring to your offense? Oklahoma State's strength has always been offense historically. What do you expect to see out of your offense with this hire from an Ivy League school? MIKE GUNDY: We're going to run the same system. He's had success, pure drop-back quarterbacks, guys that could run around a little bit, he's been in 10-personnel, 11-personnel, 12-personnel. He's played with speed at times. He's young. He's a good technician with quarterbacks. He's got a bright personality. He's good in homes at recruiting quarterbacks. We all know this. You can coach quarterbacks in our conference if you can't recruit a player to get into our conference and have success you're not going to be as good of a football coach. I think he brings all that to the table. He's worked well with our staff and they've taken him in and worked together and I think he's going to do very well. Only time will tell, but he's got a good relationship with the staff and a good relationship with the quarterbacks at this time. Q. I wanted to ask you about the quarterbacks. It is a quarterbacks' league, but it seems to me of late this league has had quarterbacks who have either been newcomer transfers or true freshmen who were able to make a splash. Is that just a coincidence or is there a way that the league plays offense that it's easier for a newcomer to adapt to it? MIKE GUNDY: We have not been in the transfer business at the quarterback position. Our quarterbacks have been developed in our organization over a number of years. That's been our history for a long, long time. I know there has been a number of quarterbacks across the country transferring to other programs and becoming one-year starters. I can't really speak to that a lot. I know that ironically for whatever reason there have been a number of young men in our league over the last ten years that have played fantastic at the quarterback position. People can debate that and discuss on either side, but for the most part I'm going to go back to the head coaches and the offensive coordinators in this league that are willing to do anything it takes to try to score every single play. I don't think there is an approach like that in any other league, but it's been that way in this league for a long time. Q. Coach, there are a lot of new faces in the Big 12 this year in head coaching spots. What sorts of challenges do you feel like that poses? MIKE GUNDY: For me? For our team? The coaches that are new in the Big 12, they've been around. We're pretty familiar with those guys. They've been successful at other schools. The one interesting thing in college football to a certain extent most teams are doing the same thing scheme-wise offensively and defensively, everybody is playing 3-down, everybody is playing 4-down. If you're not a tight end-fullback running team you're in a spread, you're trying to play action pass and trying to flow it down the field. So there are similarities more so than ever in college football. Big 12 athletic directors did a good job and brought quality coaches in our league. We're excited to have them and I don't think there is a lot of secrets out there on what any of us do on either side of the football. Q. Mike, you said in your opening statement that you were more excited about this season than you had been for one in a long time. Can you drill down on that? Why is that? MIKE GUNDY: We didn't play as well last year as we should have, in my opinion, and it was the result of me not doing my job and holding coaches and players accountable. We weren't a very disciplined football team. We weren't a very tough football team. Those are two areas that we can control the outcome. I feel like we need to be a more disciplined, physical, tough football team. So I'm going to make a point as I did in the spring and hopefully it carried on this summer when the players were working out and obviously we're not out there with them, to be a more disciplined, physical football team, and I think that will help our team. So I'm excited about just seeing the results. Q. Oklahoma has won the league four years in a row. Any particular reason for that? Is that good or bad for the league? MIKE GUNDY: They've got good players. The last couple of years they've had average quarterback play and they've overcome it. So they've been very successful and somebody's got to take it from them. That question came up a few years ago about Alabama and the SEC and my response was, and somebody from another league needs to beat 'em and take it from them and I think it's the same in dealing with Oklahoma. Liked that, didn't you, Barry? Q. My follow-ups keep coming at a weird time. You talk about the discipline and we saw that last year with penalties and different stuff. How do you try to fix that? Obviously you can try to fix it during the season but it sounds like you're doing specific things now. Can you give us insight on that? MIKE GUNDY: I can give you a good illustration. I will build a picture for you. I'm now currently raising my third child and the first two have said multiple times if we did when you allow him to do, we would have never made it through the night. And I think that's what happened to me last year in my 14th year. I let little things slide in practice and in meetings and just the overall concept and as the head coach my responsibility is to make sure we do everything perfect all the time. I didn't do a good job of that. The players at times became undisciplined. As coaches we became undisciplined so we were an undisciplined organization and that's why we played the way we did at times last year. I don't think anybody would question that there was a chance we could have had double digit wins last year. Teams we beat they probably look at themselves and say how did we let that team beat us? That goes on forever. So just being a more focused and disciplined head coach should make us a better football team this fall. Q. Mike, you joke about the OU quarterback play, but I'm curious what your thoughts have been from afar if you have any about Jalen Hurts and the career he's had so far and your thoughts about playing him this year? MIKE GUNDY: It would be from afar. I saw him play on games and like everybody else during his career. I will say that I have a lot of respect for the way he handles himself. I don't know him, he could walk through here and I would maybe not know him if I saw him but seems to be humble and appreciative for his opportunities. I enjoy watching young men have success and at time may be having a set-back and coming back and fighting through and from an outsider looking in, he's done that. He's a terrific football player. I don't think there is any question about it. So we're looking forward to playing him. People say, well that wasn't any fun. We've had a chance to play the last two Heisman trophy winners and compete against the very best in that game at that position arguably within the country winning the Heisman trophy so it's exciting for us to try to prepare against the best. Q. Coach, how much longer will you have the mullet? MIKE GUNDY: Oh, I thought about actually getting a haircut yesterday, but it was Sunday and they were closed. So I decided to wing it. I don't know anymore. It's hard for me at times to decide what I'm going to do the next day until I get into the season. So hang out and go with it. As long as it makes me look younger, if somebody said it makes you look old, I would probably cut it. THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Coach. MIKE GUNDY: Thank you, guys. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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