Oklahoma State Not Using Last Season as Motivation for 2025

Oklahoma State needs to bounce back after a brutal 2024 season, but this year won’t be about overcoming the 3-9 campaign.

Mike Gundy got a chance to speak at Big 12 Media Days, marking the unofficial start of OSU’s 2025 season. After a roller coaster of an offseason, the Cowboys can finally begin to set their sights on this fall and what they hope will be a much more successful season.

A situation like this seems simple enough. The Cowboys won only three games last season and want to prove all of their doubters wrong with a big response in 2025. However, there are some problems with that way of thinking.

“We should be at around 115 [players], so I’m gonna guess that 60% of those players weren’t here last year,” Gundy said. “So, if I was to try to use that, they would really be scratching their head and wondering what I was talking about. So, I think it’s important that each individual player has to find a way to motivate themselves in order to benefit our team.

“Now, we could have players that were on our team last year that are motivated by that, and that’s ok. We’re all different.”

Considering all of the changes OSU made during the offseason, the vast amount of incoming players likely wouldn’t be the only ones scratching their heads if Gundy tried to use last season as motivation. The Cowboys also have an almost entirely new coaching staff that has come from across the country and various situations.

There is no guarantee that OSU will have a better season in 2025, but the number of incoming players and coaches might help the Cowboys’ chances of improving. Had the Cowboys been in a similar situation to last season, where most of their production was returning, there might have been a burden of trying to overcome that 3-9 year.

Instead, everyone, including the returning players, gets a fresh start in Stillwater and doesn’t have to worry about what happened last season. OSU will have plenty of motivation and will look to prove it belongs in this era of college football, but that motivation won’t be coming from last season’s failures.