Hello friends, I’ve been told that there is a Mike Gundy-PFB story coming out at some point later this week, and I wanted to give our PFB+ folks the abridged (lol) version before it drops here in a few days. I’ll probably write about it publicly later in the year but for now only in here.
A few of you know this, many of you don’t, but on March 3 Gundy called my cell phone from his office. I didn’t answer because I didn’t recognize the number, but I did call him back. The conversation was short. It was the week before spring practice and Gundy was calling to tell me that nobody from PFB – me nor anyone else – was ever allowed to cover OSU in-person “for as long as I’m the head coach.”
I asked him why that was his position since we have been covering the team in-person for several years and he said, “I don’t believe in blogs.” And that was that.
It was sort of devastating to me in a lot of ways. As a lot of you know, I’ve worked so, so hard to build up this site and this business, and he chose to use the power he has to obliterate portions of that in our 2-minute phone call. It wasn’t illegal (that I know of), but it was an abuse of power that has frustrated me every day since then.
I followed up in the days after that, and I was never given an actual reason for why he took this position, but it has stood. No photos, no writers, no practice, no nothing. I can ask Tiger Woods a question to his face after he wins the Masters. I can’t ask OSU’s tight ends coach a question over Zoom.
No reason to feel sorry for us though. We still have plenty of sources, we will still write plenty of great stuff. We built this thing without Gundy, we’ll continue to cultivate it without him, too.
There are many bizarre parts, but maybe the biggest is that we are welcome (with open arms!) into every other sport in Stillwater. I’ve been told, “Hey this detail in that story was wrong,” but I’ve never been told that we have been anything but professional in the way we’ve interacted with teams, coaches and the school.
I think Gundy’s idea of a website is a bunch of guys in Power Rangers pajamas typing about stuff they know nothing about, and that’s fine. I don’t think he was mean-spirited about it or harbors ill will toward any of us at all (he actually mentioned Marshall and that he likes him). I just think he doesn’t understand how the internet works or that we are (by far) the most widely-read digital outlet covering his team on a daily basis. By far!
So there’s the answer to some of this summer’s questions. Did I take it too far in the way I’ve written everything? I did. Do I regret what I wrote about him? Not as much as I regret the attitude with which I wrote it. Am I still going to do my best to cover him objectively as the best OSU football coach of all time (by a margin!) despite the fact that he’s put us in a pretty difficult position as an organization? I am.
The frustrating part is that people won’t at all remember that this happened on March 3, before any of the COVID or Chuba stuff. They will think that Gundy saw what I wrote in April (after his now-infamous conference call) and this summer with Chu and then took action against us, even though it was actually the other way around (I went after him after he went after us). But again, nobody feels (or should feel) sorry for us. It is what it is.
So there you go. I feel like you guys deserve to know, and I’m sure more will be written publicly about all of this later this week. It’s a bummer to have gotten here. I think about it all the time. Whatever blame is to be had is for sure on me.
You should know that we’ll continue to do our best to cover OSU football as well as the rest of OSU athletics for as long as our organization exists. If they kick Marshall out of Payne County, we’ll still cover it. We’ll use all the tools we have at our disposal to cover OSU as thoroughly, humorously and extensively as possible for as long as you want to consume our stuff.