Gundy Discusses 2017 Signing Class

STILLWATER – Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy announced the program's 2017 signing class Wednesday and discussed all 22 signees with media in a press conference at Boone Pickens Stadium. The transcript is below:

Opening statement:
"Obviously we're very excited about this year's recruiting class. We've got another scholarship left over in case we pick somebody up before August. As you guys have seen with the list, we have a majority of high school players and then we picked up a couple of guys from two-year schools that we feel like can really address some issues right away for next year. This is really a quality class. We've moved in the direction of trying to secure cerebral football players - guys that we think can think and react quickly in the game. We tried to do as much research as we could into that sort of thing and obviously I'm very excited about the kids we have coming in. We'll know a lot more about them in two years. They all come from good families and they understand the integrity, accountability, structure and the discipline that it takes to be successful here. It was interesting in recruiting that, we've noticed over the last couple of years, we have kids come here that find out what it takes to be a part of our team and they end up not coming here because of that. And that's good for everybody because you want people that understand the commitment it takes and want to be a part of our program and our university."

On the running backs in this class:
"It could be the most interesting position for us in a year or so. Obviously, Chuba (Hubbard) has world-class speed. There's been some conversation that in four years he could be running in the Olympics. Whether that's right or wrong, I always go back to something Coach (Pat) Jones used to say that 'when you get to a certain point, you're really fast,' and he's really fast. When he was here on his visit he weighed 196 pounds, and he cracked a bone in his leg in his last game of the year so he hasn't been able to train, and he still weighed 196 pounds. So what's great about him is that he could weigh 215, maybe 220, and he's already running a 10.5. With J.D. King, we've wanted him for a long time, but I was concerned about us holding him because of the distance. When he came back on his visit with his mom, I had a good conversation with her. She said from day one that when he visited here in the spring, he called her and said 'Mom, I'm going to Oklahoma State'. He said 'I've never felt this way. It feels like home and I'm going to Oklahoma State.' So we were able to hang on to him. He's another young man that is already over 200 pounds. I think he was 207 on his visit. So we've got a couple of backs that can be good if they're durable and potentially play at 215 or 220 pounds."

On Hubbard playing with his injury:
"I don't know if it was cracked or broken or what, but they went ahead and sat him for six weeks after it, but he did go out and he finished the game with it."

On what he means by "cerebral" football players:
"The game has changed considerably, especially in this league. Teams are playing with three or four split out from the backfield and they're moving them across, faking the handoff or faking a pass. In our system, you have to be able to think really fast. You have a gap responsibility, a coverage responsibility and a play-fast responsibility, all while two guys are moving from the snap of the ball that might change my responsibility. Each year we evaluate things we think we've done positive and overall in all areas. In these last couple of years we think that players that are able to think and react quickly - that are football savvy - they'll be able to contribute better to our program. If we think you're a cerebral player and able to get their faster, we're probably going to pick you over the other guy."

On "cerebral" tying into their work in the classroom:
"It ties in somewhat. Being an employee of a public education university I'd like to say it's 100 percent, but it's not. We've all had buddies that weren't fired up about school, but they were terrific on the field and vice versa. It's a little bit of everything. We tried to be as detailed as we could in everything we did this year. Background checks and things like that are kind of the new fad, so we went into that, but that's not fool-proof. Sometimes you don't get all of the information. We also talked with coaches about details and things they might've done at their particular position and got their honest opinion about how they felt on them. We were trying to grade them on being a cerebral player and not just someone who is athletic that has potential."

On social media's impact on recruiting:
"Honestly, I find out after the fact. I got everything from my 12-year-old. He was calling me on his way to school and telling me who had signed. He was on Instagram or somehow he was getting it before I was getting it. Technology is increasing every day. It wasn't as out of control in this recruiting cycle as I thought it would be. It's almost settled down to an extent. We've not ever really been big fans of recruiting taking place on Twitter. There is instant information out there. A year ago, I would've said that half of it was false, but now I'll say that 75 percent of it is true. It's more accurate as it has ever been and I think that's because it is coming from the source."

On recruiting more cerebral players this year:
"We started it last year and we liked where it was and then we felt really good about it so we pushed harder than ever on that with this class. We wanted to find guys that maybe didn't fit the prototype as well, but were more cerebral players and may not be as fast or as tall."

On how consistency in the coaching staff helps recruiting:
"It makes a big difference. Your recruiting class is impacted when you lose a coach right before or after a bowl game, but even more so if you lose one a week or two before signing day. It creates doubt and allows other teams to go in and take shots at you. Sometimes you can fend it off and sometimes you can't. We had two guys a month and a half a go leave to go to other places, but for the most part we held everybody. Really we held everybody except for the ones that come in and see how things run in our program and they see that maybe it's not for them."

On Jelani Woods being a big quarterback:
"Yeah, he's a big man. He is on campus now. He had a great year. I think they started our 2-3 and then they ran the table and won a state championship. We are excited about him. He's in the program; lot of substance to him. Comes from a good mom and daddy. They understand commitment and the structure and discipline we look for. It will be really interesting how he develops. It will be an interesting spring because Mason (Rudolph), we won't work him a lot. We will work the younger guys. As we have our three or four thud scrimmages in the spring, the majority of them will be the young quarterbacks and we let them play."

On Stillwater:
"The flights are a big plus for us. Population is growing. We are almost 55,000. Enrollment is up to 21,000. The economic growth east of the community, all those things have helped us some. We will still want young men who are very serious about getting an education, being a part of a team and competing for a championship. Those are the ones that come to school here. Years ago we tried to make Stillwater something that it wasn't. I say this to the parents and the young men, 'We don't have night clubs that are open till 4:00 a.m., so if you are looking for that type of lifestyle, you should look somewhere else because you will be disappointed when you get here.' Our best recruiters are our current team, the guys on our team now, because we have been here long enough. They can tell the young men that visit our campus, 'Whatever they tell you, is the truth. It's the way it is.' We are very transparent. We are very upfront. It is exactly the way it is going to be. That way when they get here, we don't have any disgruntled players in the organization. Everyone understands the direction we are going in and we have done that now for years and it has worked for us."

On the Oklahoma recruits that wrestled:
"And Brandon Evers was a good wrestler. I am excited about the class from Oklahoma. I've said this the last couple years, and I will say it again this year, the talent in the state of Oklahoma is getting better and better each year. With the budget cuts and the education cuts that are happening in this state, I'm not sure how that is happening because there have been cuts all across the board. Coaches are cut, teaching has been cut. I'm a big proponent of doing whatever it takes to make education and fund education in this state, but it is not happening. But for whatever reason, the talent is getting better and better. We have a number of young men from Oklahoma that are in this group that fit the criteria we started this conversation with today. And as you know, I am a big fan of wrestlers. It is a sport that takes discipline, accountability, structure, and when you are out there on the mat, you can't blame anyone but your own. That's why I like those guys. But when you look at the guys we have, you have Evers, Brock, you have Odom, Rodriguez. When you talk about those guys, they kind of fit what we talked about earlier and we are excited about those guys. It is important to them. There is no question that the geological location of the players makes a huge impact on the program."

On signing Baron Odom from Garvin County:
"I don't know what all cities are in Garvin county. I know I've heard it on the radio when there's tornado warnings. We are excited about what Baron brings. He got in very late. We had an opening. He was a four-sport athlete. 6-4 1/2", 222 pounds, four sports. Hasn't really had a chance to grow and develop. We are looking for him to be 250 in a year and play that role that Blake Jarwin played for us. It's nice for us to say we had a spot open, so let's take an Oklahoma kid. We have one sitting right there. When I talked to him on the phone, I wanted to make it clear to him, no matter if he is with us for a year or for a day on signing day, in the end it is all the same. I used the example of Marcus Keyes that we took at 11 at night a couple years ago and he started all 13 games this year at left guard for us as a redshirt freshman, and he was the last guy we took in the class. Not that Baron needed to hear that, I just told him that's what happened to Marcus Keyes. We are excited he is a part and that we are getting an Oklahoma kid."

On if recruiting from class A high school football is more difficult to evaluate:
"It is hard to evaluate. There's not as much size and speed as some of your other schools because of population. There's not as many numbers to pick from. What you are saying is right, it is hard to evaluate in our opinion. There are more players that come from those schools that get missed on because sometimes coaches fall into how to evaluate and it is more difficult. That's where the mistakes are made in my opinion. We try to go the other direction, but we aren't perfect either. Recruiting obviously is not a perfect science. For example, our last five classes, '16, '15, '14, '13, and '12, our average rating from bigger recruiting services, we are ranked 36th in the country. And if you take those five classes, whatever this class is rated, we won't know much about it until two years from now. Two years from now, three years from now, four years from now, we can evaluate this class and say, 'Ok, we were right or wrong.' Well, if you go back the last five years, in '14, '13, and '12, then we can somewhat evaluate those classes now based on the success we have had. We have won 21 games in two years. We were ranked average 36th in the country during those five years. There's one of two things happening. Either we are damn good evaluators and the recruiting services don't know what they are talking about, or we are damn good coaches. One or the other. I don't know what it is, but we are not changing what we do.'

On how OSU has been so successful despite having an average recruiting class ranking in the mid-30s:
"Well, I had to ask a few days ago because I figured someone would ask about a rating or something. I wanted to speak intelligently about it because I never look at it. I shouldn't say that – I don't look at it during recruiting. Sometimes I look at it afterwards just to kind of see where people fall. I looked the other day, and I make comparisons sometimes to try to supplement our research to make us better. It is one of the two things I mentioned or Rob Glass, which falls into what we do here. I think he is the best in the country at what he does. We bring in guys and in two years we develop them. They come in with 18 percent body fat and go to nine percent body fat and they will put on 15 pounds and go from a 4.8 to 4.65. More importantly, he instills discipline, structure, and toughness in them that really equates to who we are on game day and why we have as much success as we have on the field and in the class room. You have our APR, that is kind of a new grading scale for academics for us. You don't hear as much about graduation rate anymore, you hear about APR, and we were a thousand last year. So there is something going on that is going in the right direction."

On whether his coaching staff is better at evaluating or coaching:
"It's one of those two. Recruiting services don't give us credit, so we're either good evaluators or good coaches. It's a little of both sometimes. I hate to make this comparison because it makes me look bad, but you know sometimes when you're in college and dating a girl and you're all fired up about it and you sit there at the restaurant and she smacks or something or does something to irritate you and 15 minutes later you're trying to find a way to get out of it and go home. In recruiting, every player we bring in deserves a coach who believes in them. We try to not evaluate the young man until he's been in our program for 24 months, he's had a chance to grow up, to develop, to be in the weight room with Rob Glass and then he has to start making strides. This is not the NFL and you can't trade them, they're here forever. We have to find a place for them. I think that's where we've benefited the most over the last five-or-six years. We've tried to find a way to make these guys contribute and help our team."

On the program's relationship with Polynesian culture:
"They're very loyal, very family-oriented. They understand structure and discipline in most cases. Their families or the generation before the parents of the young man we're recruiting have had to work extremely hard to get to this country. They're loyal to this country. They get up and work every day and are thankful for who they are and where they are. That's exactly what we're looking for here. It's not 100 percent, but in most cases they're not looking for, 'What all can you do for me and my son when he's here?' What they tell their son is, 'Here's an opportunity. You better do what they tell you to do.' It makes it easy to coach them. We don't have issues. I can pick the phone up and call their dads and say we're having an issue with missing class with so-and-so and that will be the last class missed we have from him. We really enjoy their culture and what they stand for."

On Tre Sterling on OSU's multi-sport athletes:
"Multi-sport, and also players who play on both sides of the ball, have infatuated us over the last couple of years just from an athleticism standpoint. We've found that you have more success with them being involved in special teams also, and that's a very important part of the game. I think he rushed for 2,000 yards. When you go down and talk to his head coach, he put him at running back because that's what he needed to do to win games. That happens a lot at places and he was able to play both ways. His dad is a high school principal. He comes from very intelligent people. He's very cerebral, very gifted, tough, durable, plays on both sides of the ball, very serious and no-nonsense."

On his mullet:
"I cut three inches off during recruiting because it looked really floppy and I was kind of embarrassed a little bit going into those homes. I didn't know how people would take it, but the repercussions of it have been negative. JD King's mom, when she was here, said, 'Coach, if I were you, I wouldn't cut your hair. That's your swag.'

On recruiting in Canada:
"I went to Canada in the morning then went to San Jose in the same day, so I docked a lot of airline miles. What's interesting is we talked about JD, but Chuba (Hubbard) was the same way. He was committed really early, a long way from here and a lot of schools came along and offered him scholarships. I had some doubts whether we could hold him this long, but he stayed true. He's very loyal. His mom and dad raised him right. He gets it. We had a good visit up there in Canada, and I'm excited about what he brings to the table. People ask all the time how fast he is, and he's really fast. People talk about comparing him to Tyreek Hill, and we'll see when he gets here. We can run him and we'll make the comparison to see where he is with Tyreek."

On recruiting Chuba Hubbard:
"A lot of people from that part of our country, the PAC-12 schools, were taking shots at him so I figured it'd be difficult to keep him because it's a lot closer than we are. It's still pretty far, but not as far as down here. You either get in a car or get on a plane, ours just happens to be 30 minutes further than the others and there is a connection. We talked about that with him. He flies into Denver, then flies into here. Going to some of those schools would only take 30 minutes off from the trip."

On multi-sport athletes vs. specialized athletes:
"I don't like [specialization]. I think high school kids should be able to play as many sports as they want to play. I think we're getting overwhelmed with travel baseball, softball, volleyball, AAU basketball, 7-on-7 and it's discouraging some high school athletes to play multiple sports. For us, we think it's best for them to play multiple sports and compete year round. If they're talented enough to get here, they're probably going to get here, so playing another sport isn't going to matter. When we're evaluating recruits one of the first things I ask is, 'Does he play any other sports?' Justin Blackmon was a heck of a basketball player and Dez Bryant could do anything. Guys that are talented at other sports are usually more talented on the field than guys who don't. Not always, and quarterbacks are a little different but I would recommend they play all the sports and have fun."

On if the staff made getting offensive linemen a priority this year:
"We were going to take four. I don't know what the rules are, but we had a couple committed for a long, long time and we lost them. It's extremely difficult to make up ground in the third week of December at that particular position, especially on a four-year player. Sometimes, you can grab a two-year. That was the most difficult aspect of this class, but we've faced that before here and what we have to do is the 'Plan B.' We have to find guys out there that can fill that role on the short term for maybe a year or two and fit them in. That happens to us. One of the disadvantages of where we're located is that there are four million people in the state of Oklahoma, and the number of large people that play football that are 17 years old that we recruit to play at this level, those numbers are considerably less than those in the state south of us. That's one area for us that is difficult to hold just because the pool to choose from isn't as big and everybody's picking at it. We have to step out of the box a little bit there and try to find ways to overcome it. We always have, and we will figure out a way. I'm not going to sit here and say that we had a couple of guys that were with us a long time and departed didn't affect us because it did. Once they roll out of here, if you think about it more than just two seconds, you're pretty much wasting your time because it's not going to change. You need to start finding a solution to fix it, and that's what we did."

On Malcolm Rodriguez:
"He was 37-0 in his last 37 games in high school, a big-time wrestler, and a heck of a shortstop in baseball. What that tells you is that he's got great hand-eye coordination, he's big, tough and durable. He's a winner. When they showed me his tape and told me what came along with it, I couldn't get the words out of my mouth fast enough, 'You all had better go get him.' It's hard to find guys like that. His track record says that he's a winner."

On if the return of Mason Rudolph and James Washington had an effect on the class:
"It had an overall effect on morale. There is a perception and feeling that's out there, and there is excitement that's out there. You have high-profile players like those two and they say they're coming back. You guys know that they're non-BS guys and they're hard workers. You have the leadership established that's coming back. There's excitement. The class of wide receivers in this group is fantastic. They think they're going to catch passes from Mason, so it impacted their decision and them staying with us. That feeling you get from young men coming back, the perception is always positive."

On wide receivers LC Greenwood, Braydon Johnson and Tylan Wallace:
"It's interesting when you look at them. LC is six-foot-three and we've got him down at 210. I think he was more than that. I think he was 218 on his visit. He's a big man that's going to play at 230. When we offered him, I don't think he had any offers. Once he jumped on board, which is pretty traditional for us, every other Big 12 school goes in and offers him in most cases. Then we have to battle them and hold them off to keep him. I was concerned about that because once they come in and look at his tape and see his body structure, I thought this was going to be a battle. There was a little battle at times, but we were able to hold him. Braydon Johnson is 185 pounds, and he's fast. He can fly. I doubt that he'll run less than 4.45 after he's been here a year, so he allows us to take the top off the defense, which is what we want to do anyways. And then you have Tylan, who is a fast Josh Stewart. Josh Stewart was tremendous in a phone booth, but when he opened it up he was 4.65, 4.7. I think that Tylan has the same quick twitch as him, but he's going to run under 4.5. That's what you get with him. It's a good group of skill."

On how Texas A&M leaving for the SEC has hurt recruiting in the state of Texas:
"With us, we don't really change a lot. Some of the schools that are making their way into Texas that have gotten those players to go to the SEC, they pick up really early offers from us, but we haven't been in the game late with them. It doesn't affect us that much, in my opinion. People say, 'Well, if they're taking players from them, then everything starts to slide down. There is some truth to that, but I wouldn't disagree that the departure of Texas A&M to the SEC has affected recruiting in the state of Texas and Northern Louisiana. I don't think it affects us as much as some of the other Big 12 schools in the state of Texas."

On the remaining players in the class:
"You guys know about Evers and Sione (Finefeuiaki), the Cowboy Back we took from San Mateo. He needs to come in and play the Zac Veatch role. We're looking for him to do that. We talked about LC. Arlington Hambright is an offensive lineman that came in when we had some guys leave that we need to be an impact player for us. We talked about Chuba (Hubbard), Braydon (Johnson), JD (King). Fua (Leilua) is a defensive tackle from Snow Junior College. He fits the Ofa (Hautau), Mote (Maile) role for us. We want him to come in and be a big guy inside. Patrick Macon you all already knew about because he was here. He's an inside backer for us that was out at Arizona Western, originally from Tennessee. We talked about Brock (Matin). Jake McClure is our kicker/punter we're really excited about. Jake is athletic, plays offense, defense; he's a soccer player, he's a punter and a kicker. He is six-foot-three and will probably be 215 pounds in a year or so. Kris McCune, a safety from Dallas Christian, is very athletic. I watched him play basketball and watched him dunk a basketball with his elbow above the rim, so he's got to have at least a 34- or 35-inch vertical. Lamarcus Morton from Gilmer is another guy that plays on both sides of the ball. He has a lot of numbers on both offense and defense. Gilmer is old-school, tough, hard-nosed football. Thabo Mwaniki from Denton Guyer with Coach Walsh. Coach Walsh called us four or five months ago and said we needed to check this guy out. He's very cerebral. He gets it. He understands. His best years are ahead of him. We talked about (Baron) Odom. We talked about (Malcolm) Rodriquez. Enoch (Smith, Jr.) fits the role of what we talked about. He's a two-year guy that was at Michigan State at one time and sat out. He's coming in a 300 pounder, a 425-pound bencher. It's kind of interesting, he actually trains with his dad. You can see Enoch, a guy that's six-foot-two, 300 pounds, the body structure and what he looks like. When I went in on the home visit, his dad was a bigger, better athlete than him. He works out with him, so we're excited about him. We talked about Tre Sterling. Brendan Vaughn, an outside backer-type like Shaun Lewis. He's taller and rangier, but we need him to play like Shaun. We talked about Tylan and Tracin Wallace, who has played quarterback. He's had the knee injury, but should be up and running in two months. We'll get him in here and could do some things for us at the quarterback position. Obviously, he'll probably redshirt with Mason being back. It will be interesting to see how he develops over the next couple of years. Then we talked about Jelani, so that covers everybody."

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