John Holcomb: Oklahoma State Fans Waiting For Gordon's Commitment To Cowboys In 2024

As Cowboy fans wait to see if Ollie Gordon will make his future plans public, the guys who helped open plenty of holes for the nation's leading rusher are all in.

On Monday, Jason "Queso" Brooks announced he'd be returning for another season with the Cowboys. 2023 was cut a bit short thanks to injury, but the former Vanderbilt transfer played well when healthy.

He's the fifth OSU offensive lineman returning for next season. NIL is positively impacting this group.

Joe Michalski, Dalton Cooper, Jake Springfield and Cole Birmingham will all be back, and IF Gordon is undecided, this certainly can't hurt OSU's situation.

The consensus All-American running back has a significant deal to stay in Stillwater, and he attended both the Cowgirl and Cowboy basketball games over the weekend. Does that mean anything? Hard to tell, but even OSU men's coach Mike Boynton praised Gordon in his postgame comments after the Cowboys took down Tulsa in Oklahoma City Sunday evening. Consider the full-court press engaged.

You'd have to be naïve to believe that other schools or supporters of those schools haven't reached out to at least check Gordon's temperature about other offers. It's college football in 2023 after all. But Gordon seems invested, if you will, in the Cowboy Culture.

OSU fans just want to hear him say the words- that he'll be back for 2024. If he isn't going anywhere, does he need to tell everyone he's going to stay? Does anyone do anything in sports without announcing it anymore?

My hope, and I don't want to come off as part of the grammar police, is that whatever he or any other athlete decides to make the public remember that there's a difference between "apart," and "a part."

If he's going to stay, he'll be "a part" of the Cowboys moving forward. Otherwise, he would be "apart" from them. 

The preference of those who bleed orange? That Ollie would be "a part" of everything involving OSU football.