Oklahoma State HC Details Struggles in Week 4 Loss
The Oklahoma State Cowboys are looking forward after suffering their first loss of the season in Week 4. They hosted the No. 12 Utah Utes in Boone Pickens Stadium, taking a 22-19 loss, though the score would suggest the game was much closer than it truly was.
While the Cowboys ended up scoring 19 points by the end of the game, the overall performance was putrid. For most of the game, they only scored 3 points. The ball simply wasn't moving, not on the ground nor in the air.
Seventh-year quarterback Alan Bowman completed just 16 of his 33 passes in the game, converting on under 50 percent of his tries. He was intercepted twice to add to his two touchdown scores.
"He just didn't play as well as what we would've wanted to or he would've wanted to. There's really no … I just had a guy in my office five minutes ago ask me, and I didn't have an answer for him," Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy said. "I can't imagine the game got too big for him. I just don't think he played well, I think he got uncomfortable. Then he started to move his feet around a little bit and then it kind of snowballed. I don't really have a good answer."
The Cowboys quarterback put together a poor performance to open conference play, but it certainly didn't help that there was no ground game to back him up. Running back Ollie Gordon saw 11 carries for 42 yards, far below the production he's proven capable of.
When looking at the rushing game woes, Gundy cited the stacked boxes Oklahoma State has seen recently, admitting most would have issues with defenses so heavily focused on the ground game.
"You guys might not know it, but we're averaging 3.3 or 3.4 yards a carry now, so we're almost a full yard up from where we were two weeks ago. But, it's still not good enough and effective enough versus the extra people in the box that we want it to be," Gundy explained. "We have to throw the ball better than we did two days ago if people are gonna play the way they played us, which they very well could. We knew the last game that they were gonna play that way, that's how they play everybody. We knew that going in."
Gordon hasn't been nearly as proficient as he was a season ago, but until the passing game finds efficiency by itself, it's hard to imagine Oklahoma State's opponents go away from stacking the box and making the Cowboys' rushing game the focal point.
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Kade has been covering a wide variety of teams ranging from the NFL to the NBA and college athletics since joining Sports Illustrated's On SI in 2022