Danger weekend for Top 25 teams, plus rare Oklahoma State HC search

Until Saturday Newsletter 🏈 | This is The Athletic’s college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox.

This Saturday has two of the season’s biggest games so far, Oregon-Penn State and Alabama-Georgia. But we might get a special weekend before those simultaneous main events even kick off. Lemme explain.

The Watch Grid: Tons of tests for ranked teams

One factor that always leaps out at me, when looking ahead at a college football weekend’s chaos potential: Do a bunch of ranked teams have to play road games against competent opponents? This week, the answer is a strong yes.

The first four weeks of this season each averaged five true road trips by ranked teams. But this weekend, with conference play truly underway, there are 12. With five ranked teams on byes, that means most of the active AP Top 25 is traveling this week — and four others are hosting ranked teams themselves. Danger!

(Win-loss record of ranked road teams so far this season, excluding neutral-site games: 9-11.)

Obviously, the list of teams that are ranked will continue to fluctuate each week, but this season has just two upcoming weekends in which more than 12 current Top 25 teams are on the road: 14 in Week 8 and 16 in Thanksgiving weekend, when nobody is on a bye.

Most of this weekend’s wayfarers are gonna have to work for it, too. Among those 12 ranked travelers, only Georgia Tech at Wake is favored by double digits, per BetMGM. (Yep, Ohio State is just an 8-point favorite. Told you on Tuesday the computers like Washington.)

And it goes beyond just the road-games thing. In fact, this weekend’s only ranked teams favored by three or more touchdowns are Missouri against UMass and Vanderbilt against Utah State. (Take a screenshot of this sentence, because no one has ever written it before: Vegas considers Vandy one of college football’s safest teams.)

Four ranked teams will lose to their ranked opponents, plus odds are good that at least three ranked teams will lose to unranked teams, based on the Massey Ratings’ win probabilities. Over/under 7.5 losses by Top 25 teams?

Oh right, and then Saturday culminates in those twin headliners, when most of America finally takes a look at both the Ducks and the Nittany Lions for the first time this season (seriously, the best team faced by either so far, per Sagarin ratings, is FCS Montana State) and Bama either fully reasserts itself as a title contender or fully enters panic mode, becoming 2-2 for the first time since 2003. Danger!

Quick Snaps

Carousel: Oklahoma State’s first true search in 25 years

A pretty common game being played on the college football internet this week, in light of Mike Gundy’s firing on Tuesday: “When Oklahoma State hired Gundy as head coach, _____.” The No. 1 movie on that day in January 2005 was “Meet the Fockers.” Gundy was merely 37 years old, not a robust 40. FBS was still known as Division I-A. That kind of thing.

The passage of time will always fascinate us, and indeed, a lot of time has passed since then. But in a way, even more time has passed since the semi-beginning of the Gundy era than the date of his HC hiring suggests.

At the end of the 2000 season, OSU was moving on from Bob Simmons, who’d gone 30-38 across six years. The Cowboys hadn’t had a 10-win season since Barry Sanders’ Heisman run in 1988. (The QB who’d handed the ball to Sanders that year: Gundy.)

There was an exciting subplot in which Boise State HC Dirk Koetter reportedly accepted the OSU job before joining Arizona State instead, and then the search ended with the hire of Les Miles, who’d been an assistant for the Cowboys teams in both Stillwater and Dallas.

Reports have long differed on whether Gundy was also a finalist (at the time, AD Terry Don Phillips described the OSU alum as a bit too inexperienced despite all but lamenting having not hired him). Either way, Miles then hired Gundy as his assistant head coach. When Miles left for LSU four years later, Gundy was the immediate choice to take over at his alma mater. The replacement was so swift, Gundy was saying, “This is my New York Yankees job,” by the morning after Miles’ exit.

So really, this is the first actual coaching search in Stillwater since 2000, not just 2005. Very few current college football players were even alive when the No. 1 movie was Jim Carrey’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

It’s been a long time since we’ve had to think things like, “Is Oklahoma State a really good job?” Chris Vannini took a stab at it in an article.

I think there’s a major opportunity for somebody in the current Big 12 to become the middle-heavy conference’s big boss, but it’s quite possible Texas Tech has already done that, going berserk with NIL and surpassing the advantages of booster money OSU had enjoyed earlier in the Gundy millennium. Still, there’s no reason the Cowboys can’t get back to competing for conference titles — and thus CFP bids.

As for who might lead that effort, Bruce has the initial list of names to consider, including UTSA HC Jeff Traylor, Oregon OC Will Stein (who might end up being on every list for every P4 job, at this rate) and Atlanta Falcons OC Zac Robinson, another OSU QB-turned-coach who is not yet 40. Bruce, Ralph Russo and Stewart Mandel debate OSU’s next move on “The Audible” podcast. Watch here.

More Gundy, from Stewart’s new mailbag:

Mandel’s Mailbag

Gundy was once Oklahoma State’s greatest QB and became our most successful coach. How does a fall from grace happen so swiftly and completely? — Mike S.

One of my most vivid memories of the pre-portal transfer process involved Gundy. In 2013, sophomore Wes Lunt, who had been his opening day QB1 the year before until getting injured, decided to transfer. Gundy initially blocked Lunt from 37 schools — the entire Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC, all future Oklahoma State opponents and Southern Miss, which had hired his OC. Lunt wound up at Illinois.

So I’d imagine a guy who would do that did not adapt well to an era where guys can transfer anywhere, an unlimited number of times, with zero restrictions.

Gundy also had an unorthodox approach to hiring assistants, seemingly going out of his way to find under-the-radar guys. Today, he likely has 40-50 people under his purview, many of whom turn over every year or two. That’s a whole lot of opportunities to make a bad hire.

Also, one thing Gundy was very good at over the years was identifying two- and three-star type recruits who actually had four- or five-star talent but has gone overlooked by the bluebloods. Then he just had to convince them to come. Now, of course, you have to not just find someone, but find the money to get him, negotiate with his agent, etc. Gundy did not exactly hide his disdain for all that. ‘Tell your agent to quit calling us and asking for more money. It’s non-negotiable now,” he said at the start of the 2024 season.

The thing about coaching is, as soon as you finally figure out what you’re doing, everything changes again — the rules, the schemes, and the players themselves. Nick Saban was brilliant at constantly adapting and reinventing his style. But most can only keep up for so long. Gundy must have done plenty of it himself to keep winning consistently for nearly 20 years. The guy went .653 over 20 seasons at a program that had gone .465 in the 90 years prior.

Unfortunately, it got away from him at the end.

More mailbag here.

That’s it. Drive safe out there, and see you Sunday morning.