Dana Holgorsen talks about his time at Oklahoma State

By Anthony Slater – Aslater@opubco.com – @anthonyVslater 

As expected, much of Dana Holgorsen’s weekly press conference was spent talking about his time at Oklahoma State. Here are some excerpts:

On his relationship with Mike Gundy…
We competed against each other for eight years, almost 10 years now. I had the opportunity to go work for him, which was a step up from Houston. This isn’t anything that I haven’t been quoted on saying in the past, but I left Houston to go to Oklahoma State because it was a different level. It was a different league, and I knew he had a lot of things in place that were appealing to me from a facilities standpoint, a recruiting standpoint and a program standpoint. I went there and had a good year; I knew there were good people in place.

He does a wonderful job from a structural standpoint and from an organizational standpoint, as far as how you run a program and as far as what your day-to-day operations are like. I took a lot of things from him, and from an offensive standpoint he took a lot of things from me that we were doing over the course of the previous years that fit into what he was trying to do at Oklahoma State.

On whether he planned on being at Oklahoma State for one year…
I felt that in order to get a job like the one I’m fortunate enough to have now, that it would take being a coordinator at a higher level. I took that opportunity; my conversations with him and Mike Holder, their AD who is a good friend and a great administrator, (were that) I wasn’t going to go there for a year and leave for the same job. It was going to take a job like this for me to leave the situation that I was in.

On how much the Oklahoma State offense has evolved since he left…
It hasn’t changed much at all. Just looking at it on tape there are some specific things that they do better than what we do. It’s the same offense. If you look at it the very closely, it’s called the same and a lot of the routes are the same. There’s always going to be tweaks here, tweaks there, an added formation, a different run play, a different pass play or a different set.

When they had J.W. (Walsh) in there for the four or five games that he played, he did a tremendous job. They had a little bit more of a quarterback run game because that fits his style more than (Wes) Lunt or (Clint) Chelf. It goes back to the scheming aspect of things – you’re not going to out-scheme many people. The next week when we play OU, we’re going to be looking at an offense that is very similar to ours as well. That just exists in this league.