OSU Football: Gundy On Prepping For Texas

Oklahoma State head football coach Mike Gundy sat down with Cowboy radio voice Dave Hunziker Tuesday night at Chick-Fil-A for his weekly coach's show. Gundy and Hunziker discussed last week's loss to Baylor and how the staff is preparing to face Texas.

On last Saturday's loss to Baylor:

"Most of it was fairly accurate in postgame. We had our best outing, special teams-wise. We covered really well on punts and kicks. We had some concerns going in. They have some very allusive players in their return game, and our guys did a good job of corralling them up and getting them down. In fact, we got the one turnover on a punt early in the game. We had really good run blocking from where we had been in the past. We had a couple of plays where we should've done a few things differently fundamentally, but overall we covered defenders up more than we have and guys ran hard with the ball. That was a plus for us.

"Defensively, we were able to slow their run game down, but in the end what it comes down to is when you give up that many big plays and turn the football over in critical times during the game, it's hard to win no matter where you're playing or who you're playing. Certainly, turnovers on the road against a team that's ranked No. 15 in the country really minimize your opportunity to win the game. So that's really where we're at. We've talked about it. Players understand. We're coaching and doing everything we can to eliminate those situations as we move forward. We had great effort from the players. Guys played really hard, and at the end of the game when we came up short, we went out, played defense, used our timeouts, got a stop and then the offense played hard right until the end. There are some plusses. There were some good things in the game, but key errors at critical times in the game really kept us from winning."

On preparing for Texas:

"We have to continue to improve on our basics in all three phases. I'm sure with the open week (last week), they'll have two or three wrinkles in each one of those areas. You just have to deal with it. I think we play two teams with open weeks, but I don't think there is anything you can do to prepare for it. There's a term we use in coaching, that we don't want to chase ghosts, meaning you don't want to give information to the young men or have them practice things you haven't seen on tape because there is only so much storage for them to absorb information. If you overload them, then they won't remember anything, so you just move on down the road and adjust as the game goes on."