Can’t remember and too lazy to look it up but Ruben Gant caught a lot of balls for us and played in the league a few years
I think people forget Meacham, himself, played TE here (with Gundy).
When they hired him my first hope was that he’d revamp the “cowboy back” position from a waste of scholarships to a functional position group and maybe an advantage.
The investment in NIL and their trust in the new TE group coach to bring over his guys gives me hope that this will happen.
Alonzo Mayes, Billy Bajema, and Brandon Pettigrew say “hi.” Brandon Jackson and Jelani Woods are probably thinking wtf.
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True but he single-handedly won the Texas Tech game for us, and he was a major plus in the running game for Kendall Hunter.
He was also one of our higher draft picks under Gundy.
Him only catching 42 that year is a little surprising though.
In his final season, Billy Bajema got 20 receptions. That’s not even two a game. Of course, Josh Ford only had 10 receptions last year, but we’re literally talking about less than one more touch a game, so we’re not really talking about some massive philosophical change to get to 20-30.
What’s your point other than just being contrarian to me mentioning Billy Bajema for his Les-Miles-Bedlam-Win-NFL-Career lore?
God this fanbase needs some wins.
Now I’m not going to say that the coaching staff didn’t wiff on Jelani to some degree but we also need to acknowledge that he spent a good amount of time finding his spot at OSU. Don’t forget he started out as a QB then transitioned to WR and after that to TE. Seems he gained a lot of size while at OSU which spurred the transition to TE somewhat. Things might have been different if he started out as a TE at OSU. We can never know for sure though.
My point was that Bajema was an impactful player, but we’re only talk about a 10 reception difference.
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Bajema played 20 years ago. Football then and football now are NOT the same.
On a separate note, why are we trying to emulate Iowa State? They’ve actually won fewer conference titles than Gundy has. Yet, we first copied their crappy 3-3-5 defense (and we’ve all seen how well that experiment worked) and now we seem to want to run their 3 TE Motion offense?
Gonna have a lot of blockers. Must going to try and run it down their through like old Alabama.
Bajema actually had a decent pro career. Three or four years if I’m not mistaken. Not sure he was a scholarship at first. Maybe a walk on out of Norman high
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