Two days after Oklahoma State’s core-memory win over Oklahoma — in the final Bedlam for the foreseeable future — Cowboys coach Mike Gundy stood in front of a microphone. He was asked about the clear offensive shift that had occurred for Oklahoma State, transforming a season that looked destined for disaster into one during which the team controls its destiny for a Big 12 championship and who exactly might have been responsible for sparking that change.

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Gundy coyly raised his hand.

“That’s my job,” he said.

It was a proper humblebrag, with Gundy explaining how it was a collaborative process of players and coaches offering suggestions but the onus ultimately falls to the head coach.

“I just at one point went in and said, ‘Let’s talk about who we are. What’s the best thing we can do?’” he said.

The need for a change came in the wake of an embarrassing 33-7 home loss to South Alabama, in which the Pokes gained just 208 yards of offense. And that was on the heels of two uninspiring wins to open the season, as Oklahoma State shuffled through three quarterbacks, managed a banged-up offensive line and receiving corps and labored to establish an identity.

A former college quarterback in his 19th season as the coach at his alma mater, Gundy has overseen more of a tempo, run-pass-option-heavy offense for the past dozen years in Stillwater. But with holes up front and at wideout, he opted to minimize the blocking schemes and simplify to a run-first offense. He settled on sixth-year journeyman Alan Bowman at quarterback and inserted sophomore Ollie Gordon II as the starting running back, lining up Gordon in a pistol formation behind Bowman, which allowed him to use his power and vision to get downhill faster as opposed to going east and west while reading the RPO.

“We kind of went back to, for lack of a better term, an old-school running game,” Gundy said. “Let’s push all our chips out there. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it can’t be any worse.”

It worked. The Cowboys (8-3, 6-2 Big 12) followed up the South Alabama defeat with a road loss against Iowa State but racked up 409 yards of offense in the process, including 121 on the ground by Gordon. The team then rattled off five straight victories, with upsets over Kansas State, Kansas, West Virginia and the Sooners, and has won six of its past seven to move into a tie for second place in the Big 12 behind Texas.

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Several players have stepped up — Bowman has had his moments, Brennan Presley has been a rock at receiver and linebackers Collin Oliver and Nickolas Martin have wreaked havoc in the backfield — but Gordon is the chief reason for and beneficiary of that turnaround. The 6-foot-1, 211-pound sophomore out of Fort Worth leads all FBS rushers with 1,414 yards, averaging 163.1 rushing yards and 1.8 total touchdowns per game at 6.8 yards per carry during the past eight games. He has had four games of 150-plus rushing yards during that span, including 553 combined in back-to-back wins over West Virginia and Cincinnati last month, the most by an Oklahoma State player in a two-game stretch since Barry Sanders in his Heisman Trophy-winning 1988 season.

“After that (South Alabama) game, I had a meeting with the coaches, and they told me to get ready to carry it more,” Gordon said following the win over Cincinnati. “It’s great whenever your name is in the talk with those OSU greats.”

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The Pokes are no strangers to success under Gundy, who has led the program to 18 winning seasons in his 19 at the helm, including seven with double-digit wins and a Big 12 championship in 2011. Oklahoma State is less than two years removed from a 12-2 campaign in 2021 that came just inches short of another Big 12 title and a likely trip to the College Football Playoff. But then came a disappointing 2022 in which the Cowboys started fast before crumbling to a 7-6 finish, sandwiched between two offseasons of considerable talent drain via the transfer portal. When that bled into the South Alabama loss and early season struggles in 2023, a restlessness began to seep into Stillwater as outsiders questioned whether the old-school, unvarnished Gundy could adapt to the new age of college football.

It’s why this season’s about-face is shaping up to be one of Gundy’s most impressive coaching performances in a career built on those efforts. He long has established himself as an Oklahoma State legend, its winningest head coach by more than 100 games who has sustained an unprecedented level of success and consistency. But this year’s is arguably the most unexpected. With a win on Saturday at home against BYU, the Cowboys will clinch a spot in the Big 12 championship game, likely against Texas, which would give OSU a chance to take down both the Sooners and Longhorns in their final Big 12 seasons before joining the SEC.

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Gundy, 56, said, “It took us awhile to figure out who we were,” acknowledging he had no idea just how dominant Gordon could be based on his freshman year and this past offseason. The former three-star prospect had 308 rushing yards last season, third on the team behind starting running back Dominic Richardson and starting quarterback Spencer Sanders, both of whom transferred elsewhere. Gordon had just 19 carries through the first three games of this year, emblematic of the broader adjustment the offense required.

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It hasn’t been all duck soup since then, either. The one blemish during the past seven games was a 45-3 road loss to UCF in which the Pokes gave up nearly 600 yards of total offense and gave away four turnovers, with Gordon held to 25 yards on 12 carries. And Gundy noted it has been a challenge at times to keep a social butterfly like Gordon grounded, blocking out the attention he’s garnered this season and the added pressure that comes with it. Yet the progress on both fronts is obvious.

“(Ollie) is learning and growing and getting better. He plays really physical, he competes, and he plays extremely hard,” Gundy said. “What’s going on right now is the best situation for him, but we as a team had to go through some changes based on portal running backs, portal quarterbacks, portal linemen — there was a lot going on.”

It underscores another adjustment by Gundy, one made beyond the Xs and Os. His blunt style and abrasive reputation didn’t exactly mesh well with the sport’s transition toward the transfer portal and NIL, something many pointed to as an explanation for the recent roster departures and last season’s collapse. Gundy fueled that narrative, defiantly telling The Athletic this spring: “I do what I think is right, and I don’t care. … I’m also not gonna change my ways and change who I am.”

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Except now, Gundy admits that he was wrong and that he has changed.

“The portal and the NIL are extremely difficult for me. I was resenting both of them because my personal opinion is that it’s not beneficial for young people, but I finally realized that it doesn’t matter what I think,” said Gundy, who added he had a change of heart about six months ago. “It’s like not agreeing with what the tax laws are. You have to pay whatever tax bracket you’re in, whether you agree with it or not. That’s a wild comparison, but you get the picture.”

Concerning the portal specifically, the shift was less about the program’s approach to recruiting out of it and more about Gundy overcoming his troubled feelings toward it, and what he believed those portal departures represented. Moving past that has also helped him come around on NIL and the burgeoning role it plays in roster building and retention.

“The portal really broke me when it first started three years ago, because I took it personal,” he said. “And then I realized that sometimes kids leave because they leave — they want to do something new. So I’ve now gotten over the personal side of the portal and am trying to adapt to the financial side of NIL.”

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Gundy is candid that Stillwater isn’t exactly swimming in big-dollar NIL offers, but the capabilities are expanding and improving, in part because he decided to become an ally instead of an obstacle.

“That’s what is unusual for me because this is not what I originally signed up for as a coach. But it doesn’t make a difference what I signed up for,” he said. “These are the new parameters of college football. You can either like it as a head coach, or you have to get out and go do something different.”

Gundy knows no other life. The Oklahoma native went directly from Cowboys quarterback to position coach in 1990 and has spent the past 34 years on college sidelines, the vast majority of them at OSU. He attributes last season’s drop-off and the early struggles in 2023 to, for the first time in his career, not having a solid grasp on his roster amid the overhaul boom in college football. He views it as a learning year, one in which he was too slow to cater to his revamped personnel.

It’s not a stretch to conflate the alterations Gundy made off the field to those he made on it this season, a coach accepting that he cannot direct the wind but can adjust his sails. The result is a Top-25 Oklahoma State team that navigated its way out of a brewing maelstrom to the cusp of a Big 12 title bout. That’s the most immediate task, one that no one expected just a couple of months ago. But Gundy understands the bigger test will be whatever lies beyond this season when the portal opens and the annual reshuffling of rosters begins anew. That’s particularly true for a player of Gordon’s caliber because he will have no shortage of outside interest and opportunities entering his third season.

“The real challenge for me will be in December when it starts over again. I don’t know who is going to leave in the portal, what we’re going to have to do to go get players to replace them, and then trying to manage the NIL part of it and keep people here and happy,” Gundy said. “I do feel good about where we’re going and that we’ve checked our pride at the door. … The genie is out of the bottle, and she’s not going back in. So you adjust and learn to become a CEO of a business, which is what college football is now. Because it’s not going to change.”

But Gundy did. In a few different ways. And Oklahoma State looks better off for it.

(Top photo: Brian Bahr / Getty Images)