BIG 12 CONFERENCE FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME: BAYLOR VS OKLAHOMA STATE

December 4, 2021

Kasey Dunn

AT&T Stadium

Oklahoma State Cowboys

Postgame Press Conference

Baylor 21, Oklahoma State 16

Q. Kasey, with all the struggles in the first half, can you just talk about the resolve of your guys in the second half to be within inches of still winning it in the end?

KASEY DUNN: Yeah, that was potentially the worst game we probably could have played, and to be there at the end with a chance to win it versus a very good football team, I think says a lot about the character of our team, a lot of the bounce-back attitude that our guys have had all throughout the year. I thought Spencer was tremendous down the stretch. He made a lot of good decisions. I thought our offensive line protected him when we needed to protect him. I can't say enough good things about the way that we bounced back.

Q. Just seeing you sitting over there, I can tell the disappointment and can see that in the guys after the game. So many guys just refusing to want to leave the field. What are you feeling right now personally after this?

KASEY DUNN: May have been the hardest game I've ever been a part of. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is. Should have won that game, plain and simple. Struggles in Red Zone. Score zone, to be specific. Left a lot of points on the field out there, so I don't know. I'm struggling big-time.

Q. This is a question I know that will be better answered in a couple of days when you have had a chance to look at tape film, but from your vantage point, the sequences there were you needed a touchdown and got three, and Dez came up just short. Better defense by them or anything you saw that was obvious in terms of shortcomings by the offense in terms of punching either one of those in?

KASEY DUNN: I should have known. We had our issues trying to move the ball early against them, run game. That's on me. Probably should have put the ball in the air a little bit at the end. It's hindsight, but, yeah, the two possessions, we ended up coming up short on the first one and got down to the 2 yard line and ended up kicking a field goal, and then the second one, obviously, if we had a touchdown either one of those, we win. We didn't do it, so it lands squarely on me. I should have, in hindsight, probably put a little bit of trust in our receivers and our quarterback to hook that thing up knowing how stout they were up front. They were moving, and they were putting our guys in a rough position to try to dig people out, and we just went after it. Just went power-on-power, and they got the better of it.

Q. Kasey, Jaylen being out, when did you realize he wasn't going to be good to go, and how did that change things for you with the running game?

KASEY DUNN: After the first series. I knew he wasn't going to be himself, so we moved forward. Does it really change the running game? I don't know. Doesn't change the calls. The calls are going to stay the same.

Yeah, he is an energizer out there for us, and he is great in protection, and he seems to squeak out just unforeseen yards, so, yeah, it stings. It's like losing your best receiver. I mean, it hurts. Or losing your quarterback or whatever. He is just a great attitude, positive attitude on the field and on the sideline, so to lose him from the game, yeah, it hurt us for sure. Just how he carries himself, the expectation to win, the expectation to move the football.

Q. Coach, I know towards the end you had some creative plays. You had the pass from Brennan Presley to Spencer Sanders. What was that like when you are getting down to crunch time? Was it just try to unleash the playbook? What was it like trying to make the plays like that?

KASEY DUNN: I told the guys before it started that we weren't going to leave anything on the call sheet, and I meant it. I wanted our guys to know that we were going to take some shots and, you know, go after it a little bit. We didn't want to take anything back home with us to Stillwater. We wanted to be aggressive in our play. Coach Gundy was on board with that. We wanted to go out and throw that ball around a little bit. A little bit out of contact for us. Not tremendously. We did the same thing versus O.U. and had a lot of success. They did a nice job.

We were getting down towards that end there, and like I said, just to try and find the way I wanted to get that flip back, the throw back to Spencer, in a third down situation. We got it and got the first down. I was hoping it would be a little bit more than that, but they did a good job of defending it. We got the first down out of it, so it ended up working. Yeah, we just didn't want to take anything back to Stillwater.

Q. You had played Baylor. You had won a lot of close games in this conference this year. Did you know going in this was going to be a really tough game to win, a four-quarter kind of fight with them?

KASEY DUNN: We thought so. We thought if we could get up on them a little bit and force them to have to push down the field versus our DBs, then maybe we would have an advantage. That was what we were trying to do, and we got behind ourselves, and then it was kind of catch-up mode from there. Kind of took us out of really what we wanted to do, but all in all, I think you look back at the second half, I think we move the ball. We moved it fairly well. Just had some hiccups in the score zone.

I wish I could get a number of situations back. Probably number of calls back, but it is what it is. We punch that thing in there at the end, and this is a completely different conversation. It's resolve of our players. It's finding a way to win. It's all those things. Unfortunately, we're six inches short of that.