MustangPokeFan
Deputy
First of all….welcome!
Here’s the legitimate angst and concern among longtime Cowboy faithful with what is going on right now. We had an enormous opportunity after being the second best Big 12 team for the last 10+ years to become the big dog in this new conference. Instead, over the past couple of seasons, Gundy has seemed detached and unwilling to make changes when it’s blatantly obvious that certain assistant coaches absolutely needed to be replaced for the good of the program. He also turned his nose up at embracing the portal game. The easiest recruiting he could have done would have been to make the effort to make the departing players want to stay. He made no effort at all and pretty much blackballed any player that went into the portal even though one option would have been for them to weigh their options and to come back. Part of what’s going on right now is we are paying the price for that unwillingness to make the hard decisions with coaching personnel and his cold detachment toward players. For goodness sake he doesn’t even call them by their names but uses their jersey number to refer to them.
What is more concerning for the long term and what I believe will cause Gundy to have to be replaced is this. Mike Gundy has done a remarkable job in the last 15 years of finding hidden gems amongst three star athletes and doing a masterful job of developing those athletes over four years to where our seniors on each team are very good football players. Look back no further than the defense with Malcolm Rodriguez and company as well as the numerous elite players that we have sent to the NFL during that time on offense. With just a few exceptions, most of those players came here as three star or less players and were developed into elite players. That has been a winning formula for this program. Now with the radical changes in the transfer portal and NIL, that formula is now worthless and undoable. Look at the nearly two dozen very good players that we developed in our “system” and our culture that are now playing on other teams because they left last year and went for the money and/or more high profile teams. Gundy won’t be able to use that development formula any longer because he won’t have four years to develop a player and if he does develop them in a couple of years they’ll be off to greener pastures.
Without the ability to have time to develop players and team chemistry Gundy is the left with the challenge to win the portal battle which he will never do. Players do not relate well to him and he is often distant and aloof. Pretty much the opposite of Coach Prime or even coaches like Klein and Venables. It’s really unfortunate the timing of all of this because we had this window of opportunity to be an elite Big 12 program and it looks more like we’re headed to be a bottom feeder in the new Big 12 conference. For those of us who have supported the program for many decades and a long time before Gundy was coach with our attendance and financial support, that’s a very legitimate reason for angst and disappointment.
You can be both grateful for all Coach Gundy has done and still not support him taking a wrecking ball to all of it before he leaves. He’s been compensated pretty handsomely for his efforts! He needs to immediately adapt and get engaged or hand the program off to someone who will!
