Bedlam Week Begins with the Idea that Something Has to Change
STILLWATER — It's Sunday of Bedlam week and Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy and his staff weclomed the players back this afternoon for meetings and a practice.
Scoreboards in Bedlam have much more resembled those counters in casinos showing the amount of money won, tote boards at a horse race track like Remington Park, or the old McDonalds hamburger signs that kept up with millions and the billions served. The average Bedlam score over the past decade has been Oklahoma State’s 35.3 to Oklahoma’s 42.2. That’s the average!
I’ve got news for everybody. If Oklahoma State is going to win this edition of Bedlam the Cowboys defense will need to break the mold or the offense is going to need some juice.
My bet would be on the defense. The Cowboys proved at Kansas State that even missing a few key characters contributors the 2020 defense was able to play up to standard. Safety Kolby Harrell-Peel will be back for this. Safety Tre Sterling should be 100 percent as well.
The average score in Oklahoma State games this season is 28-to-17.6 and for OU games it is 46.1-to-24.4.
Cowboys defense has proven it is legitimate.
Bruce Waterfield/OSU Athletics
“It’s a cycle,” Cowboys head coach Mike Gundy said last week on the Big 12 Coaches call. “It goes this way in football. Offenses got way ahead with schemes, RPO (run-pass option) concepts, playing fast, attacking down the field vertically, then great quarterback play.Now, the defenses have rallied and come up with answers for what offenses were doing,” Gundy concluded.
His defense has done it best of all this season with a mixture of satisfactory run defense and aggressive and stifling pass defense with lots of sacks and quarterback hurries coupled with lots of man defense mixed with zone looks. The Cowboys defense is far from quarterback friendly.
For Bedlam Oklahoma State will need an uptick in offense and that could come in any number of improvements or additions.
There is no doubt quarterback Spencer Sanders has room to get more comfortable and be more productive. We’ve seen it.
Running back Chuba Hubbard has talked about his situation.“It is so frustrating not to be able to do what you know you can,” Hubbard said after the K-State win as he has been nicked up by injuries and keyed on be opposing defenses. Meanwhile, LD Brown has been outstanding.
Getting Tylan Wallace back for the Bedlam game means having the most productive and electric receiver in the Big 12, but the more the merrier and there are candidates. Red-shirt freshman Langston Anderson and the transfers Tay Martin and Dee Anderson could add to Dillon Stoner, Braydon Johnson, and Landon Wolf.
Then everybody saw what many have been talking about in Bixby freshman and last season’s Oklahoma High School Player of the Year in speedy Brennan Presley.
Brennan Presley scores the only Cowboy offensive touchdown at Kansas State.
Bruce Waterfield/OSU Athletics
“He made a big play,” Gundy said of the touchdown at Kansas State. “He took the end around and we had an unblocked guy that he was able to kind of stutter-step and outrun around the corner and then kind of weave his way into the end zone. And that’s the reason why we signed him. We watched him do that in high school for years and have tremendous success and be a very, very productive football player when he had the ball in his hands. Hopefully, we’ve got more of that to come over the next few years.”
Offensive coordinator and receivers coach Kasey Dunn is a believer.
“He’s pretty good with the ball in his hands, and we wanted to start building a little bit of an opportunity for him to get out there and play,” Dunn added. “And he’s done a great job in practice, so we gave him an opportunity and he made something of it.”
Presley, some other offensive candidate, or a huge effort by the defense will be needed to make the Bedlam numbers add up the way the Cowboys want them to next Saturday.
