Most of you will remember Sports Illustrated pitiful attempt at a 5-part takedown of the Oklahoma State football program earlier this year. The piece was researched almost entirely by an Oklahoma grad (red flag), profiled only bankrupt and disgruntled ex-players (red flag), and was broken down into 5-parts since they knew the multiple articles were incredibly soft (red flag).
In the end, all they ended up doing was highlighting some of the recruiting tactics OK State is willing to employ while simultaneously accentuating the perception of the NCAA's unwillingness to bring them to justice. I couldn't think of a better recruiting tool even when I was reading that farce. This 5-parter shits on the Longhorn Network for recruiting. Some of the stories profiled talked about $1000 handshakes and other under the table money given to stars on the team. They told of a culture where teachers made sure that you were eligible no matter what. It touched on prevalent drug abuse that was swept under the rug and young co-eds as hostesses/prostitutes. I could hear the collective laptops of high school football players nationwide firing up to work on their applications that night. Go Cowboys!
And now 40-plus year old Mike Gundy has said as much. He's quoted yesterday, "I think it helped us in recruiting... We had four or five players that were really good players that started calling on us and showing interest the next few weeks after the article came out. That was the only thing I could attribute it to, because we certainly weren’t playing very good... Any publicity is good publicity... But there was interest from players that we didn’t have any interest in until that came out."
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