For two decades, Oklahoma State was the slow cooker of the Big 12 Conference. The recipe was simple: acquire three stars, let them marinate in Mike Gundy’s program, turn them loose as juniors and seniors. It was methodical. It had staying power. And it worked more often than it didn’t. 

Then Eric Morris drifted into town with a GM in his mid-20s and a transfer portal strategy that would flip the league on its head. 

What’s happened this offseason is a total roster reset. Morris isn’t patching holes or upgrading in a few key spots. He’s attempting to flip the entire offense in a single offseason.

Since taking the job late last November, Morris has acquired a sport-high 85 new players. Fifty-three of those newcomers are transfers, with 24 of them playing on the offensive side of the ball. Twenty players followed him from North Texas.

We’ve seen coaching changes and new-look rosters before. But this? This is a microwave-ready test of whether chemistry can happen over the course of one spring ball and fall camp. 

There’s a certain bond among a group of guys who have bled together for multiple years. You see it in the way an offensive line blocks as a unit. How pass catchers have a feel for where the ball is headed on a certain play call. At Oklahoma State, continuity used to be a source of pride. 

Now? It’s a thing of the past. By bringing so many players from Denton to Stillwater, Morris hopes that the shared language those guys developed can be a bridge for the rest of the newcomers. It’s a calculated game that bypasses the traditional “magic” of the sport in favor of a plug-and-play reality.

If this move works, it’s a brilliant exploit of the current college football landscape. If it doesn’t, it’s a cautionary tale of what happens when too much new happens at once. 

No doubt about it, the biggest acquisition of the offseason for Oklahoma State was quarterback Drew Mestemaker. Mestemaker has one of the best stories in all of college football. Before ripping it up at North Texas, he notably didn’t start a single game during his high school career. After impressing Morris during a throwing session, Morris allowed him to walk on with the Mean Green. Mestemaker was thrust into action in a bowl game, played extremely well, and the rest is history. 

Last season, Mestemaker was arguably college football’s most prolific passer behind Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza. He wasn’t just excellent; he was the nation’s most efficient passer. He led the American Athletic Conference with a 68.9% completion percentage and 34 touchdowns, and led the nation with 4,379 passing yards. He was the catalyst for the Mean Green winning 11 regular-season games and propelling the Mean Green to the conference championship game. If he hadn’t planned to follow Morris to Stillwater, he would’ve been arguably the most prized portal player in college football.

There’s certainly no guarantee that the Morris-Mestemaker hot run of form will continue in a more difficult league. But the fact that Morris was able to keep Mestemaker as the face of his Air Raid offense is a program-altering win. 

For as good as Mestemaker was last season, he wasn’t the only prolific Mean Green player to make the migration to Stillwater. All-Conference running back Caleb Hawkins followed suit, too. If Mestemaker was the lightning, Hawkins was the thunder, notching a conference-high 1,434 yards and 25 rushing touchdowns. He possesses a rare combination of speed, vision, and power, and will undoubtedly make a big impact for the Cowboys if the offensive line gels.

Mestemaker and Hawkins grabbed the much-deserved headlines, but other good players from Denton made the trek to Stillwater, too. Ashton Lepo, Ty Mercer, Braydon Nelson, and Desmond Magiya should be good upgrades on the offensive line. And Wyatt Young and Terrance Lewis should provide pop on the outside at the receiver positions.  

North Texas fans should understandably be bummed out seeing so many good players from an 11-1 win team leave. But if you’re a Cowboys fan, you’ve got to be excited. 

The biggest question with this group is how well the talent translates to a tougher league. It should be fascinating to see what happens when a large swath of a G6 offensive line tries to prove it can hang in a Power 4 league.

For 20 years, Mike Gundy was the face of Oklahoma State football. He was gruff, brutally honest, and never shied away from a microphone. He had an undeniable cowboy aura about him. He was part Old West caricature, part stallion on the sidelines. Right or wrong, he was Mike Gundy through and through.

And for all of the great things he did for the Cowboys program—propelling them to consistently punch above their weight, winning 10 or more games eight times, and churning out a litany of high-end talent—things went off the rails during his final two seasons. The Cowboys are currently riding an 18-game Big 12 losing streak, due in large part to Gundy’s reticence to adapt to the transfer portal era of college football. 

Morris is not Gundy. He’s not loud. He’s not a cowboy. And he’ll never have a rant as iconic as Gundy’s “I’m a man, I’m 40!” tirade. 

But maybe that’s the point. Morris doesn’t need to be an icon; he just needs to prove that his methods win football games. 

In the cold, calculated world of modern college football, the transfer portal is one of the few currencies that still matters. As we saw over the last 24 months, a prickly attitude and cowboy aura can only get you so far.

College football is about adaptation. Always has been, always will be. Gundy refused to adapt, and his once-proud program fizzled out. Morris has proven he can and will adapt, and because of that, the Cowboys program will be a lot better off for it.

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In this episode, we officially welcome ourselves back to college football with a full 2026 season primer. Before preview season begins in earnest, we reset the board with the biggest changes you need to know, from conference realignment, new teams, and bowl games to rule tweaks, the coaching carousel and a longer road to the national championship in Las Vegas. Consider this your intro course for the upcoming season.

We also run through the biggest names and roster moves shaping the season, including a huge crop of new head coaches, notable broadcast changes, the biggest transfer portal targets, and the quarterback storylines that could define the year. Plus, we look at early national title odds, conference favorites, Group of Six playoff contenders, and the broader themes we’ll be tracking all summer as our full preview series gets underway.

Also: the Ball-Sac rivalry, North Dakota State’s FBS arrival, the triumph of bike shorts, the return of the Poinsettia Bowl, and a joyous march in the Fleck Parade.

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