COLLEGE FOOTBALL? MIKE GUNDY HAS DRIVEN DRUNK “A THOUSAND TIMES”
That’s what the coach said, before retracting it, when defending Oklahoma State’s Ollie Gordon II, who was booked for DUI with vodka and tequila in his car as a swirling sport takes on odd boundaries
In Oklahoma, crashes involving drunk drivers killed 220 people last year, when the ugliest Schooners ranked 14th in national data. Cleveland County just nailed a football star, Oklahoma State’s Ollie Gordon II, who was driving 82 miles per hour in a 65 zone with open bottles of vodka and tequila in his vehicle. He was swerving, according to state highway patrol, and was booked for driving under the influence.
But rather than suspend Gordon and remove him from games, his coach ignored the breath alcohol content of .11 and .10. Mike Gundy should be mature enough to avoid his verbal bungling of 2007, when he shouted, “I’m a man, I’m 40.” Now 56, he somehow has chosen a worse footpath through Big 12 life. He defended Gordon because, hell, Gundy has “probably done that a thousand times in my life.”
How’s that for protecting a back who rushed for 1,732 yards, scored 21 touchdowns and won the Doak Walker Award last season? Face up to your own drunken woes.
“So I looked it up on my phone, ‘What would be the legal limit?’ ” Gundy said. “Like, in Oklahoma it’s .08 and Ollie was .1. So I looked it up and ... I thought, really two or three beers, or four — I’m not justifying what Ollie did, I’m telling you what decision I made — well, I thought, I’ve probably done that a thousand times in my life and, you know, was just fine. So, I got lucky. People get lucky. Ollie made a decision that he wished he could have done better.”
What’s the point, anymore, of saying Gundy should be reprimanded or fired? He’s an example of why college football no longer works as a name. Try a supersonic splurge, which is why he simply clarified his comments on X — “My intended point today at Big 12 media days was that we are all guilty of making bad decisions. It was not a reference to something specific,” he wrote — and only had us wondering if he indeed was telling the truth. Then he let Gordon speak at the event.
“You know, just showing maturity by being here and being able to face everything that’s going on instead of ducking and running,” he said. “I felt like it would have been disrespectful to leave my teammates and my coach up here and have them answer the questions when I can be here to answer them. I just felt like I would have left them in the dust if I just wouldn’t have shown up at all.”
Ducking and running is still his game, thanks to Gundy, who said on ESPNU: “People have said, ‘Is he playing in the first game?’ Yeah, he’s playing in the first game because that’s what he does, OK? He needs to take care of his business. I’m not gonna seclude him and not play him in the game. I understand the severity of the situation and know this: Is suspending him for one game really gonna matter? I don’t think so. Now you wanna suspend him for six games maybe? Maybe that’ll do it, but then I don’t think that that’s fair to everybody else on our team and I have to take them into consideration.
“I made a decision based on what I thought was best for everybody involved and from this point moving forward he needs to try to do better, like we all do. And the one thing I would say to people is, just be cautious about judging unless you’ve never put yourself in that situation. Ollie’s a great person that made a mistake.”
Such is the new world where crimes don’t matter and winning games is the only due criteria. If Gordon is contending for the Heisman Trophy, will anyone remember his little bust? Make it go away rather than addressing it. We must observe this sport with a certain madness, including trips from Seattle and Los Angeles to Piscataway and Ann Arbor, where Jim Harbaugh is no more, while Kalen DeBoer takes over at Alabama and Nick Saban becomes a palpable voice at ESPN, where he might not be joined by Pat McAfee (hooray!). We’ll also have a Big Ten with 18 teams, a Big 12 with 16 teams and SMU, Stanford and California in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
“Deepest conference in America,” said Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, coming to us from Las Vegas, where he was finding a corporate sponsor for naming rights. “We are truly a national conference in 10 states, four time zones and all eyes are now on the Big 12 for all the right reasons. I think it's safe to say we are more relevant now than ever before. Naming rights is one. Private equity is another.”
Anyone care about Geography 101? Or not killing anyone on the roads? Relevance is what counts as universities cash in on the NCAA’s antitrust settlement, worth more than $2.7 billion. To beat Utah, Kansas State and Arizona, Oklahoma State can’t afford to let Gordon miss one series, much less three games.
“He’s going to play,” Gundy said. “I might make him carry the ball 50 times in the first game, but he’s going to play. We have 68 employees in our building and 139 other players. My job now in the business world that we’re in is to make decisions for everybody. He’s going to go through enough that’s really going to be some sort of punishment — right or wrong, either way, I don’t know.”
I don’t know, either. What is right or wrong? Let him carry for 250 yards at 20 years old and forget about the vodka and tequila. I think that’s wrong. But in Gundyville, it’s apparently right.
He’s a man, he’s 56.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.