Mike Gundy: OSU would have won 10 games 'if I had done my job the way I should have'

Mike Gundy’s signature moment from the 2018 season came on a Saturday night in late October.

Gundy’s Oklahoma State team upset Texas that night, though college football fans remember that evening for more than just the win in Stillwater. Texas coach Tom Herman briefly got furious at Gundy over an apparent miscommunication over the OSU coach’s actions near the end of the game.

And after the game, Gundy famously said that Twitter was destroying the country and added a fart noise for dramatic effect.

Oklahoma State was 6-6 in the regular season

That Saturday stands out so much because there wasn’t much else to point to for OSU during 2018. Gundy’s Cowboys went 7-6 last season and finished above .500 only because of a Liberty Bowl win over Missouri.

If Gundy filled out a self-evaluation after the season, he might have put “fart noise” in the space that asked him how he did as a coach in 2018. Because Gundy doesn’t think very highly of his coaching performance.

The coach told the Tulsa World in an interview published Monday that “the first reason that we won only seven games was me” and that he would do a lot of things differently if he had the chance.

From the World:

“It would take forever to tell you,” he said. “I got out of my box on handling things as I should. I just thought everything would work itself out, and I wasn’t as disciplined [in making corrections].

“That’s why we won seven games. If I had done my job the way I should have, we would have won 10.”

Oklahoma State had a roller-coaster season. The Cowboys obliterated Boise State in September and lost to Texas Tech the next week. Losses to Iowa State and Kansas State followed in the next three weeks before the win over Texas.

Oklahoma State then capitalized on that Texas win with losses to Baylor and Oklahoma before an upset win over West Virginia to seal bowl eligibility.

Given that Oklahoma made the College Football Playoff, that loss is excusable. But if OSU had gone 2-2 instead of 0-4 against Iowa State, Kansas State, Baylor and TCU, and won its bowl game, the Cowboys would have won nine games.

Clearly, Gundy thinks that he’s responsible for that underachievement. And that’s the right thing to do given that he’s the face of the program and got a pay raise of over $600,000 per year after flirting with Tennessee in late 2017. It’s hard to shirk responsibility for a bad season immediately after getting a raise that’s 12 times the median income in your home state.

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

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