There is a pretty easy mistake to make when looking ahead to Oklahoma State.
Pull up last year’s numbers, see a team that went 1-11, failed to win a Big 12 game and finished near the bottom of college football offensively, and it becomes awfully easy to think Oregon’s first road trip is against a continuation of that team. The reality is much different.
The uniforms are the same, Boone Pickens Stadium is still going to be loud Saturday morning and a handful of familiar Cowboys remain, but almost everything else about Oklahoma State football has been pulled apart and rebuilt. That probably needs to be the starting point for any conversation about Oregon’s next opponent.
Forget almost everything you remember about 2025
Oklahoma State averaged just 14.2 points and 292.4 yards per game last season while allowing 33.3 points and 418.3 yards. The Cowboys finished 1-11, went 0-9 in Big 12 play and eventually moved on from the Mike Gundy era after more than two decades.
Eric Morris responded by doing something considerably more dramatic than tweaking the roster. Oklahoma State says 91 players on this year’s team are newcomers, a total believed to be the most for one team in major college football history. Only 24 players from last year’s Oklahoma State roster remain, while more than 45,000 snaps of previous Division I experience were imported into Stillwater.
That is a staggering amount of turnover, and it changes the way this team has to be evaluated. Oregon isn’t really preparing for the 2025 Cowboys with a new coaching staff. It is preparing for something much closer to a first-year expansion team assembled from Oklahoma State holdovers, transfers from around the country and a large collection of players Morris already knows.
There are 21 former North Texas players on the Oklahoma State roster, including 18 who played for Morris there last season, and that familiarity is probably the most important place to begin when trying to understand what the Cowboys are trying to become.
Eric Morris tells you what Oklahoma State wants to become
Morris is only 40, but his offensive résumé already travels through a pretty significant chunk of modern spread-football history. He coached receivers for Mike Leach at Washington State, spent five seasons as an offensive coordinator at Texas Tech and recruited and coached Patrick Mahomes there. He later became the head coach at Incarnate Word, spent a season coordinating Washington State’s offense and then took over North Texas.
His quarterback résumé includes Mahomes, Baker Mayfield, Cam Ward, John Mateer, Chandler Morris and now Drew Mestemaker, but the more important piece for Oregon this week is the pattern behind those names. Morris has spent 13 consecutive seasons as either a head coach or offensive coordinator, and his teams have produced a top-five passing offense nine times and a top-10 total offense 10 times.
North Texas led the country last season in both total offense and scoring, and this was not simply an offense built on throwing the ball 60 times a game. The Mean Green averaged 512.4 yards and 45.1 points per game, producing 318 yards through the air while still rushing for 194.4 yards per game and 5.3 yards per carry.
That is probably the most useful thing to understand about Morris before we get into the actual scouting later this week. He wants space, tempo and explosive plays, but he isn’t trying to build an offense that survives only through the quarterback. The opening loss to Tulsa just did not look anything like the finished version of that vision.
Start with Drew Mestemaker
If there is one Oklahoma State name Oregon fans should know before Saturday, it is Drew Mestemaker.
His path is unusual. Mestemaker was a backup quarterback as a high school senior and originally arrived at North Texas as a walk-on, but by last season he had become one of the most productive quarterbacks in the country. As a redshirt freshman, he completed 68.9% of his passes for 4,379 yards, 34 touchdowns and nine interceptions, leading the FBS in passing yards and yards per attempt.
When Morris took the Oklahoma State job, Mestemaker followed him, which gives the Cowboys at least one major point of continuity in the middle of all this turnover. Oklahoma State changed coaches, coordinators, terminology and most of the roster, but its quarterback is not learning Morris’ offense from scratch.
The Tulsa game showed both sides of that equation. Mestemaker completed 29 of 49 passes for 241 yards and a touchdown, but he also threw two interceptions and averaged only 4.9 yards per attempt. Oklahoma State’s longest completion was just 27 yards, which is a long way from the quarterback who averaged 9.5 yards per attempt last season.
Oregon would obviously prefer that version of Oklahoma State to show up again Saturday, but there is not much reason to assume one bad afternoon in a brand-new environment suddenly erased what Mestemaker had already shown in Morris’ offense.
And Mestemaker did not come alone
Two more members of North Texas’ offense followed Morris and Mestemaker to Stillwater, and they may be every bit as important.
Running back Caleb Hawkins was one of college football’s most productive players last season. As a true freshman, he rushed for 1,434 yards on 231 carries — 6.2 yards per attempt — and scored 25 rushing touchdowns. Add four touchdown receptions and Hawkins’ 29 total touchdowns set an FBS freshman record.
Wide receiver Wyatt Young caught 70 passes for 1,264 yards and 10 touchdowns at North Texas before following Morris to Oklahoma State as well.
So while almost everything around them changed, Morris arrived in Stillwater with a pretty substantial offensive starter kit already packed. His quarterback threw for more than 4,300 yards, his running back scored 29 touchdowns and his leading returning receiver produced more than 1,200 yards.
That makes Oklahoma State’s opener all the more interesting, because the Cowboys still made a point of getting those players involved even while the offense sputtered. Hawkins carried 18 times for 79 yards and caught six passes, while Young caught eight passes for 84 yards. Neither produced the kind of explosive play that defined North Texas last season, but the usage itself offered a pretty good indication of where Morris wants the football to go.
Those are three numbers — 17, 24 and 10 — Oregon fans are going to see quite a bit Saturday.
Tulsa showed how far the rebuild still has to go
This is where Oklahoma State becomes difficult to evaluate after one game.
The Cowboys didn’t get run off the field by Tulsa. They had 27 first downs to Tulsa’s 15, ran 86 offensive plays and outgained the Golden Hurricane 368-361. Oklahoma State also possessed the ball longer and repeatedly moved into Tulsa territory, so this was not a game in which the Cowboys simply failed to move the football.
The problem was what happened once those drives began to matter. Oklahoma State lost two fumbles, Mestemaker threw two interceptions and the Cowboys repeatedly came up empty on fourth down. Four possessions ended in Tulsa territory without producing points, Oklahoma State finished minus-three in turnover margin and the offense generated only one play longer than 20 yards in a 24-10 loss.
There is a temptation after watching something like that to conclude the offseason hype was misplaced, but that feels premature after one game. The more useful takeaway is probably that Oklahoma State looked exactly like what it is: a team attempting to combine an enormous collection of new players into something functional very quickly.
The talent is not difficult to find. The consistency, at least so far, is.
Now there is a real problem at left tackle
One thing Oregon does not have to wonder about this week is whether Oklahoma State will have its starting left tackle. Jacob Sexton suffered a broken leg on Oklahoma State’s fifth offensive play against Tulsa and has been ruled out for the remainder of the season, which turns an already unsettled offensive line into one of the more important subplots of the week.
Sexton transferred from Oklahoma and had quickly established himself as one of the Cowboys’ most important offensive linemen. Morris said after the Tulsa game that Sexton had probably been Oklahoma State’s best offensive lineman during fall camp, and he had also been voted a captain.
Now Oklahoma State has to sort through its replacement options immediately before facing Oregon’s defensive front. Desmond Magiya and Shaun Torgeson are listed as an “OR” at left tackle this week, and both played there after Sexton went down.
Magiya was the first man up Saturday and brings familiarity with Morris after transferring from North Texas. He played 251 snaps at left tackle there last season despite also having experience inside at guard. Torgeson later moved over from the right side against Tulsa and actually brings more recent experience at the position, having started at left tackle for Portland State last season and played nearly 800 snaps.
Normally there might be another answer waiting behind them, but that is not the case this week. North Texas transfer Braydon Nelson, who played for Morris and had been viewed as another possible answer at left tackle, continues to work his way back from a knee injury. Morris has said he is not going to rush Nelson back, and he will not be available against Oregon.
True freshman Ja’Qwon Evans, who had been listed behind Sexton before the opener, was also removed from the left tackle depth chart this week. That leaves Oklahoma State choosing between Magiya and Torgeson based largely on how each performs in practice.
I don’t want to turn the War Room into the Scouting Room, because there is a much deeper conversation to have about what that could mean against Oregon. Still, it does not take much imagination to understand why Oklahoma State’s left tackle situation has suddenly become one of the most important pieces of this matchup.
The defense got rebuilt, too
The transfer reset wasn’t limited to Morris’ offense.
Oklahoma State’s starting defense against Tulsa included former Texas Tech corner Mo Horn, North Texas safety Evan Jackson, BYU/Arizona State linebacker Tate Romney, Oregon State/UCLA linebacker Isaiah Chisom in the broader rotation and several other additions spread across the defensive front and secondary.
There are still a few recognizable Oklahoma State holdovers, most notably defensive end Jaleel Johnson, a 6-foot-4 fifth-year senior who has spent his entire college career in Stillwater. His 2025 season was cut short after four games, but he had 2.5 tackles for loss and four quarterback pressures before the injury.
The initial defensive result against Tulsa was at least interesting. The Golden Hurricane averaged 6.3 yards per play and produced six plays longer than 20 yards, so this was not a dominant defensive performance, but Oklahoma State held Tulsa to 1-for-11 on third down and intercepted Baylor Hayes once.
That is probably a fair description of the Cowboys as a whole after one week. There were flashes of what Morris and his staff are trying to build, but there was very little consistency from one series to the next.
Which is probably the best way to think about Oklahoma State
Saturday’s 24-10 loss certainly took some air out of an offseason that had generated surprising optimism in Stillwater, but it did not erase the reasons that optimism existed.
Morris did not inherit a 1-11 roster and simply promise to coach it better. He replaced almost all of it, imported the quarterback who threw for 4,379 yards, the running back who scored 29 touchdowns and a 1,200-yard receiver from an offense that led the country in scoring and total yardage, then surrounded that group with dozens of other transfers.
That entire project went onto the field together for the first time Saturday and looked very much like a project. Now it also has to replace one of its most important offensive linemen before facing the No. 2 team in the country.
That is probably the correct frame for Oregon this week. The Ducks aren’t walking into Stillwater to play last year’s Oklahoma State team, but they also aren’t necessarily playing the finished version of Morris’ vision.
They are getting something in between — talented, unfamiliar, potentially explosive and still trying to figure out exactly what it is. After what happened in Tulsa, Oregon also gets the added complication of facing that team in a sold-out home opener with a roster and coaching staff that suddenly have a lot to prove.
We’ll get much deeper into how Oklahoma State wants to attack Oregon in The Scouting Room, but for Wednesday the most important thing to understand is that the 1-11 record everyone remembers from last season is probably the least useful way to define the team Oregon is actually going to see in Stillwater.