Should Oklahoma State Look to Renew Another Rivalry?

Bedlam might be out of reach, but Oklahoma State could still renew another rivalry in the not-so-distant future.

Over the past couple of years, the college football landscape has been turned upside down. From the transfer portal to NIL to conference realignment, the sport is nearly unrecognizable from what it looked like five years ago.

Of course, through all of the madness, the Cowboys lost out on one of the most important weekends in the Oklahoma sports calendar when the Sooners moved to the SEC. Bedlam was always the premier game of the regular season for OSU, and it was seen as something that would never go away.

With 2024 being the first year without Bedlam, a new normal has taken over in the state and in Stillwater. While the Cowboys had some of their most memorable moments in recent history in their two recent Bedlam wins in Stillwater, those moments are nearly impossible to replicate without the rivalry.

The Cowboys and Sooners have refused to budge on their future nonconference schedule and seem somewhat uninterested in making the needed effort to renew the rivalry. That could open up the possibility of a different rivalry being renewed in Stillwater.

Along with Oklahoma leaving to the SEC, Texas also made the move away from the Big 12, which also ended OSU’s series with the Longhorns. While the Cowboys and Longhorns don’t necessarily have an extensive history, they are generally close in location and have had some memorable battles over the past couple of decades.

Similar to Bedlam, any OSU and Texas matchups would likely have to wait until the 2030s, but it might be a great way to add another premier game to the schedule that fans would legitimately care about. Sure, the Cowboys have teams such as Arkansas, Nebraska and Alabama on future nonconference schedules, but their history with those teams is lacking over the past couple of decades.

Maybe an OSU-Texas matchup is just as unlikely as a renewal of Bedlam, but the Cowboys getting an opponent that fans have true disdain for on the schedule should be a priority moving forward.