Mike Gundy’s four-minute explanation of why he isn’t suspending Oklahoma State’s star running back Ollie Gordon over a recent DUI is so bizarre, so convoluted and so utterly devoid of anything that approaches a fully-formed adult thought process that there are only two conclusions to be drawn from it.
The first is that Gundy, now entering his 20th season at Oklahoma State, has way too much job security and knows it.
The second − and, full disclosure, this is just me reaching for something that makes a little bit of sense out of the senseless − is that Gundy is a master troll using a potentially dangerous situation to make a stupid point about name, image and likeness rights for athletes.
The big headline out of this controversy came via Gundy’s comments on an ESPN+ show Tuesday from Big 12 Media Days in Las Vegas. While trying to untangle his logic for doing nothing publicly to punish Gordon, Gundy surmised − based on his extensive Google searching − that Gordon’s reported blood-alcohol content of 0.10 would have translated to “two or three beers, or four” for a 215-pound man.
“I’m not justifying what Ollie did, I’m telling you what decision I made,” Gundy said. “I thought, ‘OK, I’ve probably done that 1,000 times in my life and it was just fine so I got lucky. People get lucky.’ “
This is, of course, an insane thing for someone to say. It’s an especially insane thing − and, in some places, a potentially fireable thing − for a college football coach to say when you consider their responsibility in overseeing 100-plus young men whose behavior is highly scrutinized because of their prominence in the community.
There’s simply no way to justify talking about drunk driving in any context that gives room for excuses, and Gundy failed to clear that very easy bar. But that’s barely a surprise coming from Gundy, whose arrogance and public relations judgment almost led to a player mutiny in the summer of 2020 when he publicly promoted the extreme right-wing One America News network, which trafficked in conspiracy theories and trashed the Black Lives Matter Movement.
For a couple days, Gundy was in real trouble as players boycotted team activities for a short period of time and some former players spoke up with troubling anecdotes about the racial climate in Oklahoma State’s football program.
Humbled and apologetic − maybe for the first time in his entire career − Gundy saved his job and was forced to take a $1 million pay cut.
Then over the next four seasons, he posted three more top-20 finishes and got another contract extension and another one after that. Back to being bulletproof. This is how college football works. It is what it is.
Over the next few days, Gundy will face another round of whack-a-mole because a prominent coach glossing over a DUI by talking so cavalierly about his own experiences getting behind the wheel after a few drinks is bad business.
Now 56 years old, you’d hope Gundy would have emphasized what terrible judgment he had as a younger man and express regrets about putting lives in danger − if he indeed had those regrets − rather than trying to calculate in his mind how many beers Gordon would have needed to consume to be held out of a game against South Dakota State.
But that’s all pretty obvious stuff. What isn’t so clear is why Gundy, on multiple occasions Tuesday, referenced how much money Gordon makes as a college football player in trying to explain his approach to a disciplinary issue that he was going to address at Big 12 media days and then hope it disappears from the discourse by the time the season starts.
“We can say these guys aren’t employees, but they’re really employees,” Gundy said as he started down his road to nonsense. “These guys get paid a lot of money, which is fine, but there needs to be a side to what they do that they have to be able to − for lack of a better term − face the music and own up to things.”
In Gundy’s world, this means that Gordon’s punishment would be a free trip to Las Vegas where he would have to make a public apology and answer a few questions from the media. If Gundy believes that is more embarrassing and more corrective than forcing Gordon to miss football games, so be it. It’s probably not worth getting outraged about one way or the other.
But what does being an employee have to do with it? Does Gundy realize that for many people, particularly those in high-profile public jobs, a DUI would result in at least a suspension?
“Ollie made a decision he wish he could have done better, but when I talked to Ollie, I told him you’re lucky you got out light because you make a lot of money to play football,” Gundy said. “So back in the day, being able to cover the cost of what he’s going to go through (with the legal process) would be difficult for a college player. It’s not for him. Now I’m not speaking for him but I’m saying that’s not an issue for him. So nobody got hurt.”
Again … huh?
College coaches have long used this idea that being publicly embarrassed by a bad headline is a worse punishment that being held out of games, so you might as well just go ahead and put them on the field so that they can help you win games. Gundy is far from the first to make that calculation, as self-serving as it might be.
But why even raise the idea that players are now making, in some cases, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars through NIL…
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