Inside Oklahoma State’s roster build: 140 scheduled visits, 87 new players, 1 star QB

STILLWATER, Okla. — It didn’t take long for Eric Morris to understand just how much work needed to be done at Oklahoma State.

On Dec. 7, 2025, less than 48 hours after he wrapped up his final game at North Texas, Morris gathered his new team together. The meeting room, which seats roughly 200 people, wasn’t even a quarter full.

Major college football rosters have more than 100 players, but there weren’t even 50 present when Morris first spoke as the team’s new head coach. Some had already entered the transfer portal, and many more were planning to do so.

“I remember FaceTiming the guys back in Denton immediately after it happened,” said Raj Murti, Morris’ general manager at North Texas and now at Oklahoma State. “They asked, ‘How was the first team meeting?’

“I said, ‘Guys, there’s no one here. We need a whole team.’”

The next seven weeks were a whirlwind as Morris, Murti and the Oklahoma State staff constructed one of the biggest and swiftest roster overhauls in college football history. When the dust settles in August, the Cowboys will have 87 new players, tying Deion Sanders’ 2023 Colorado squad for the most newcomers in the transfer portal era.

The goal is to turn a team that cratered in the final years of the Mike Gundy era — going winless in league play each of the last two seasons — into a legitimate Big 12 championship contender, not just in 2026, but for years to come.

“We needed a clean slate,” Morris said.

Under Gundy, Oklahoma State became a consistent winner. The former Cowboy quarterback took over a program in 2005 that was sub-.500 all-time before his arrival (471-502-48) and transformed it into a modern success story. After going 170-90 in 21 years — making him the winningest coach in school history by more than 100 victories — Oklahoma State is on the right side of the all-time win column (641-592-48).

But cracks in the foundation began to show in recent years, and things quickly unraveled after Oklahoma State won 10 games in 2023 and appeared in the Big 12 Championship Game. The Cowboys went 3-9 in 2024, ending the season with nine consecutive losses. In 2025, their only win came against an FCS school. They lost at Oregon 69-3 in Week 2, and after a 19-12 loss to Tulsa in the next game, Gundy was gone.

The reasons were plentiful, but the program’s failure to adapt to the rapidly evolving roster management space, from how they used the transfer portal to what they were willing to spend on NIL, was near the top of the list. Last season, Oklahoma State had what some rival personnel directors deemed the worst roster in Power 4 football.

That’s what made the clean slate Morris referenced so necessary. Before overhauling the roster, Morris did the same with the staff. All the on-field coaches are new. “No holdovers except one off-the-field guy,” Morris said. “We needed people that believed in my vision.”

There were several members of the 2025 team that Morris would have liked to retain but couldn’t due to budgetary reasons. Signing transfers costs significantly more than high school recruits, and having to court so many meant Oklahoma State had to be mindful of how and where it spent its money.

“The bigger (the roster flip), the harder it gets because getting kids from the portal, it’s more expensive than doing it the other way,” Morris said.

But Morris was going to err on the side of newcomers based on his past head coaching experience and discussions with others who have been in similar situations.

“Talking to coaches in the portal era, taking over clubs who weren’t very good, they always wish they had cleaned out more when they were rebuilding something,” Morris said. “That’s something multiple coaches said to me.”

Among the 87 newcomers, one held the key to the entire rebuild: quarterback Drew Mestemaker.

Mestemaker, who broke onto the scene as a redshirt freshman last year at North Texas, has a unique story. He was never a full-time varsity starting quarterback at Vandegrift High in Austin, Texas. He walked on at North Texas after a recommendation from Jeff Christensen, a longtime private quarterback coach whom Morris knows from his days at Texas Tech with Patrick Mahomes, a Christensen client.

Mestemaker became the starter last season after Chandler Morris transferred to Virginia, and he threw for 4,379 yards (the most in the FBS) and led North Texas to a 12-2 record (the best in school history). His production, frame and arm talent drew plenty of suitors in the portal, but the Cowboys knew if they got him, everything else would fall into place.

“Any player we spoke with, whether they were coming from North Texas or elsewhere, the first question they asked was: Is Drew coming?” Murti said. “Players are always going to be your best recruiters.”

Mestemaker had video calls with two schools but committed to Morris on Jan. 3, a day after the portal opened.

“I can’t leave ’em,” Mestemaker said. “I gotta see this thing through.”

He didn’t come cheap, though, landing a two-year deal expected to pay him $7.5 million — $3.5 million in 2026 and $4 million in 2027, according to the Tulsa World.

Getting Mestemaker helped Oklahoma State’s efforts in courting two other offensive stars who led the Mean Green to the American Conference Championship Game. Caleb Hawkins, the No. 1 running back in the transfer portal, led the FBS with 25 rushing touchdowns as a true freshman in 2025, while Wyatt Young finished third nationally with 1,264 receiving yards and had the third-most yards after catch (768).

For Hawkins, it was a bit of a homecoming. He grew up in Oklahoma and played high school ball at North Rock Creek in Shawnee, roughly 60 miles south of Oklahoma State. His position coach at UNT, Patrick Cobbs, also joined the OSU staff.

Young said he tested the market, but knowing Mestemaker and Hawkins were Stillwater-bound, along with so much of the coaching staff, made a difference.

“Finding a place where you’re comfortable, you trust the coaching staff, and they’re gonna use you the way you want to be used, that made it an easy option for me,” Young said. “At the end of the day, this is where I wanted to be because my guys are here.”

Said Murti: “Drew, Caleb and Wyatt turned down a lot of money to come here.”

As important as Mestemaker, Hawkins and Young were, the process to land the other 84 newcomers was no less frenetic.

Morris’ first week on the job included individual meetings with each of the players who attended his first team meeting. Some were offered new contracts to stay. Others were told the harsh reality of their futures in Stillwater.

“We told them, ‘This is what we think of you, this is what we potentially want out of you,’ or ‘maybe it’s time for you to find somewhere else to play,’” Murti said. “It was tough. It was hard to do that.

“Some of those guys, I told them, ‘Hey, if you want to stay here and play football, that’s great, but there won’t be another rev share contract.’”

It wasn’t nearly as public as Sanders’ “Louis Vuitton” moment when he took over in 2023 — which sparked significant reaction — but the result was much the same. Modern college football roster management isn’t pretty.

Murti, executive director of player personnel Ethan Russo (who spent 2025 at Wisconsin but was at North Texas before that) and director of scouting Wes Drake joined the personnel staff in December. The timing of the new winter transfer portal window — which had been in December in previous years but was pushed back to January this year — allowed them time to quickly assemble a board of transfer portal targets.

Murti and Drake had assembled one at North Texas, but for a different caliber of player, given the Mean Green’s standing in the national landscape.

“We had to completely shred that,” Murti said.

At Oklahoma State, they needed Power 4 players.

Drew Mestemaker belongs in some outrageous convos pic.twitter.com/HLDvR9vZ5a

— NFL Draft Files (@NFL_DF) April 26, 2026

North Texas’ bowl game practices didn’t start until Dec. 15, so some of the UNT assistants who were joining Morris in Stillwater had time to come up, watch film and offer their thoughts on who to target.

Then came the visits. Between transfers and high school recruits, Oklahoma State hosted 88 official visitors over 18 days in January. At one point, Murti said more than 140 players had scheduled official visits, but as players committed — to Oklahoma State or elsewhere — roughly 60 of those visits were canceled.

Russo and Drake handled all initial conversations with agents. They had two key questions for every potential transfer: “What’s his price range?” and “Would he be interested?” If both answers were agreeable, they’d schedule a visit.

Things moved so quickly that some players had their official visits canceled while they were on campus because someone had committed in their place.

“I had to walk into a position meeting one time and interrupt one of our coaches and say, ‘Hey, I have to have this conversation with you all because I can’t sit here and let you continue (in good faith). Someone committed in your spot, this dollar amount is no longer available, this is what I’ve got now,’” Murti said.

The incident in question was for a starter-level position, with starter-level pay, but once the other player committed, only backup money was available at the position.

“I said, ‘If you want us to take you to an airport and fly you somewhere else, I completely understand,’” Murti said. “I didn’t want to waste anybody’s time, because that’s not fair to anybody. But that was a very real thing that happened.”

There were similar occurrences throughout the January frenzy. It was a byproduct of needing so many players on a compressed timeline. The portal opened on Jan. 2, and Oklahoma State’s spring semester classes began on Jan. 12, with no opportunity to backfill any lingering holes on the roster in a second, spring transfer portal window, which existed in the previous three offseasons.

“At the end of the day, you just have to be honest,” Murti said. “None of it’s good, but you can’t say we’re at fault for taking a kid’s commitment while someone’s on campus, when these kids can cancel on us at any time. It goes both ways.

“Nothing’s pretty about it, but it happens.”

Of the few dozen 2025 Oklahoma State players who attended Morris’ initial team meeting, only 25 remain. That number could drop to 24 if returning defensive lineman Iman Oates, who is awaiting word from the NCAA, is denied another season of eligibility.

If that happens, the Pokes will add a walk-on in August, bringing the total of newcomers to a record 88.

Will all these efforts pay off? Injecting the nucleus of a top-25 team into the roster can’t hurt. Even though Mestemaker, Hawkins, Young and the rest of the North Texas clan will face stiffer competition in the Big 12, many of them are upgrades over the 2025 Cowboys. All three were considered among the top transfers at their positions and were heavily pursued by other Power 4 programs.

Morris views the 19 former North Texas transfers as program-builders given their familiarity with how he wants things run. “They’re our glue guys,” he said.

Could Oklahoma State replicate what Indiana did in 2024? Curt Cignetti imported 13 former James Madison players to a team that went 3-9 the year before his arrival, went 11-2 and made the College Football Playoff in his first year.

“We could be watching the next Indiana football,” Young said. “I feel like our ceiling is 16-0.”

Though that’s the hope, making the Playoff is probably asking too much from a program that hasn’t won a conference game since 2023. BetMGM has the Cowboys’ over/under win total set at 5.5. Making a bowl would be a significant achievement given their recent history.

But this Cowboy squad will look far different, given the roster turnover and star power at quarterback. Getting an entirely new roster to jell will be a challenge, but Mestemaker believes it’s an advantage.

“I know this team has the players for us to go play well,” Mestemaker said. “We have a very winnable schedule. It’s 80-plus new guys on a team, so it’s very hard to scout us. … I think we might surprise some people with how good we are.”

One thing’s for certain — Morris and Murti don’t want to do this again. The clean slate is meant to serve as a foundation for a more sustainable roster-building process that leads the Cowboys back to national relevance.

But what does Morris think of potentially having the record for most newcomers?

“I don’t know if I’m proud of that or not,” he said. “I’ll let you know after the first season.”