Expectations for Oklahoma State football this season are laborious to guage. The hope is that the Cowboys can repeat their historic 2021 marketing campaign that noticed them attain 12 wins, play within the Big 12 title sport and defeat Notre Dame within the Fiesta Bowl. However, changing a handful of key items on each aspect of the ball won’t be simple. And that features former defensive coordinator Jim Knowles, who is now at Ohio State.
Earlier this week on the ‘Cover 3 College Football’ podcast, CBS Sports’ Chip Patterson and Tom Fornelli mentioned Oklahoma State as a mystery team for the upcoming 2022 season.
“If I have to predict where they’re going to start the season ranked, I would say 15 to 20,” Fornelli stated. “I feel that in the event you have a look at this team going into the yr, clearly it is coming off a nice season, reached the Big 12 Championship, practically received the convention, did win the Fiesta Bowl, however as you talked about, Jim Knowles [is gone]. That’s a enormous query mark to me, as a result of Oklahoma State, through the years when it was actually buzzing underneath Mike Gundy, when it nearly acquired to the BCS title sport not that way back, this was a team that was scoring like 50 factors a sport. That was the difficulty with attempting to beat it. You could not simply present up and attempt to cease it defensively. You could not. You knew you have been going to have to attain 40 factors to beat the Cowboys.
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“But in the previous couple of years with Jim Knowles, this is a team that utterly modified its identification. It turned defense-first. It had the very best protection, or top-of-the-line defenses within the Big 12, and offensively it actually wasn’t that explosive. It wasn’t scoring that many factors. So, now that Knowles is gone, if that protection does drop off a little bit — possibly it does, possibly it would not, who is aware of — are we going to see sufficient from Oklahoma State’s offense that they will make up for any attainable deficit suffered by that defection or drop off on the defensive aspect?
“When you look at their schedule, it starts off pretty easily,” Fornelli continued. “Like Central Michigan, that’s a good MAC team, but Oklahoma State should beat it. They get Arizona State at home — God knows what that team’s going to be. They should win. They get Arkansas Pine Bluff, they’ll win. When they get to conference play, they start with Baylor on the road, they get TCU on the road, they get Kansas State on the road … and then they get Oklahoma on the road. That’s not the easiest schedule to manufacture and get through. So this is a team that I feel like it could start the year ranked, it might end the year ranked, but I would not be surprised at all if Oklahoma State ends up 8-4 and just not ranked all together come the end of the year.”
Knowles revitalized the Oklahoma State protection into one of many prime items within the nation. The Cowboys ranked among the many prime 10 within the FBS in sacks per sport (No. 1), tackles for loss per sport (No. 1), third-down protection (No. 3), scoring protection (No. 9), complete protection (No. 4), speeding protection (No. 5) and extra. Oklahoma State led the Big 12 in every of these classes and a number of other others.
To fill the void left by Knowles, Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy employed Derek Mason, an skilled coach that has spent the previous 12 years on the Power Five degree. Mason was most just lately the defensive coordinator at Auburn for one season, and earlier than that he was the pinnacle coach at Vanderbilt for seven seasons.
“There’s a lot of similarities with what we were doing that he was doing, or has done at some point in his career,” Gundy stated throughout follow this spring. “So that adjustment, camaraderie in the defensive room, has been really good up to this time. I’m excited about watching our defense continue to grow with what we’ve developed over the last two to three years.”
Oklahoma State is scheduled to open the 2022 season towards Central Michigan on Thursday, Sept. 1, at Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater. Kickoff is set for six p.m. CT on FS1.
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