Oklahoma State enters the 2026 season as one of the most fascinating reset jobs in the country, and the reason is simple: the Cowboys have changed just about everything.
Mike Gundy was gone three games into last season, and the bottom fell out from there. Oklahoma State finished 1-11 in 2025 after going 3-9 the year before.
That’s a brutal slide for a program that was in the Big 12 title game in 2023 for the second time in three years. For Cowboys fans, that feels like a different era entirely.
Now Eric Morris is in charge, and he has brought a very different kind of energy to Stillwater. Ari Wasserman of On3 put Oklahoma State among the five teams that “won the offseason,” ranking the Cowboys No. 2 behind only LSU, which hired Lane Kiffin before last season ended.
The logic behind that ranking is rooted in the same blueprint that worked so well at Indiana. Wasserman pointed to Morris as a version of the “Curt Cignetti model” - a coach who arrives with a clear plan, a proven track record, and enough roster movement to make a real Year 1 jump possible.
Cignetti’s path at Indiana was the template. He came over from James Madison before the 2024 season after successful runs at JMU, Elon and IUP, but he had never coached in a power conference.
Indiana hadn’t won a national championship and hadn’t won the Big Ten since 1965. Cignetti changed the roster fast, brought over a wave of JMU talent, leaned hard on the transfer portal and turned the Hoosiers into a winner immediately.
That 11-2 season ended with a College Football Playoff berth, and the momentum kept building from there. Indiana went 16-0, won the Big Ten, won the CFP national championship and Fernando Mendoza won the Heisman Trophy before becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft.
Morris’ résumé fits the same general shape. He built Incarnate Word into a winner and then rebuilt North Texas.
At Oklahoma State, he arrived with nearly 20 players from North Texas and almost his entire staff. He also went even heavier into the transfer portal than Cignetti did, leaving him with nearly 90 new players in the program.
That kind of turnover has pushed expectations upward in Stillwater. After back-to-back seasons of 4-20, the baseline now is different.
The sense around the program is that Oklahoma State has enough talent to at least make a run at bowl eligibility in Morris’ first year. If everything clicks, the Cowboys could even put themselves in position to chase the Big 12 title game again.
That would be a massive one-year turnaround.
And if Indiana’s 3-9 season before Cignetti’s arrival taught anything, it’s that a fast climb is possible. Fall workouts are closing in, and Oklahoma State suddenly looks like one of the biggest swing teams in the sport.