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STILLWATER, Okla. — Drew Mestemaker insists he hadn’t made up his mind yet. The prized quarterback had just been on a call with Oregon and felt it went well. He phoned his head coach, Eric Morris, to check in.
They’d agreed from the start that Mestemaker would be a fool not to consider his options with millions of dollars on the line as one of the top QBs in the portal. While most expected him to follow Morris from North Texas to Oklahoma State, Mestemaker confessed he was still trying to work through his decision.
“All right, two things,” Morris told Mestemaker.
He reminded his star pupil what they’d just accomplished together. In Mestemaker’s first season as a college starter, he led the nation in passing yards, operated the No. 1 scoring offense in FBS and achieved a 12-2 record, the best in school history.
“And two? Don’t break my heart.”
Morris hung up.
“I was like, ‘Dang, how do I go somewhere else after that?'” Mestemaker reported with a laugh.
Oklahoma State’s newly hired coach needed a yes from his record-setting quarterback as he attempted to totally rebuild a roster in just 10 weeks, aiming to flip the worst team in the Big 12 into an instant contender.
The Cowboys enjoyed a remarkable run of sustained success under Mike Gundy with 18 consecutive winning seasons. Gundy secured his eighth 10-win season in 2023. Then the program totally fell off the cliff with a 4-20 record and zero conference wins over the last two years. The winningest coach in school history was fired three games into a hopeless 1-11 season last fall.
The school brought in the 40-year-old Morris and trusted him to execute a complete shake-up this offseason. He’s practically leading an expansion team in 2026. Oklahoma State’s 105-man roster this year will feature 85 new players, including 60 acquired in the transfer portal. Even for these endlessly transactional times for college football, this is one of the most dramatic roster flips ever attempted.
The to-do list as soon as Morris accepted the job on Nov. 25: Convince Mestemaker to follow his coaches up to Stillwater. Get a dozen more North Texas starters committed to joining him. Restock every position group with the right mix of transfers and high school signees over a marathon month of nonstop recruiting, nearly 90 official visits and daily chaos. And, well, try your best to stay under budget.
The new Cowboys aren’t shy about saying they intend to win big right away. Nobody’s urging patience or calling this a four-year process. They have a plan, and they’re hoping it ends up looking an awful lot like the defending national champions.
“We’re trying to write the same script as Indiana,” wide receiver Wyatt Young reported.
Eric Morris and Drew Mestemaker Doug Hoke; Bryan Terry/The Oklahoman/Imagn ImagesMORRIS HAS GONE through this before, but never to this extreme.He had highly productive offenses in each of his three years as North Texas’ head coach. He just didn’t have the resources to retain top talent. Each offseason brought major turnover.Morris sat down with players and tried to explain why the grass isn’t always greener elsewhere. But the Power 4 money was often too good to turn down, and the financial gap kept growing. Year after year, he’d lose valuable starters. But North Texas kept finding new playmakers and kept scoring.The Mean Green were one win away from reaching the College Football Playoff last season with a roster that cost just under $1 million.As he interviewed with Oklahoma State, Arkansas, Auburn and UCLA last November and weighed his own move up, Morris knew each opportunity required different roster build-outs. There were a lot of reasons why Oklahoma State made the most sense for Morris, a Texas Tech grad who played for Mike Leach, coached under Kliff Kingsbury and knew the Big 12 well.A smaller community to raise his two growing sons. An easier 200-mile move up I-35 for his coaches and their families. A power program that needed a shot of energy and excitement after a brisk, brutal decline. Best of all: Oklahoma State was going to totally let him do it his way with his people.”This place really, really fits me,” he reported. “It’s been the perfect move for us.”At Oklahoma State, he started with a fully funded revenue-sharing budget for football of around $15 million with support to fundraise that total up to $20 million or more. Now that Morris had the funds, could he pay for his North Texas stars — especially Mestemaker — to stick with him?Schools began lining up for Mestemaker as soon as he started thriving last season. The former walk-on was a revelation and put up an FBS-best 4,379 passing yards — including a school-record 608 against Charlotte — in his first full season as a starter since ninth grade.
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After a 59-10 win over Washington State last September, Morris went to general manager Raj Murti and reported, “We gotta pay Drew.”
The first-year GM feared it was a waste of their limited money, knowing how quickly the redshirt freshman was moving up Power 4 teams’ recruiting boards, but agreed he deserved it. Mestemaker sat down with Murti and senior associate AD Steve Keasler and they bumped him up to $65,000.
“They were just saying, ‘We’re not dumb enough to think nobody else is going to be calling you,'” Mestemaker reported. “‘We know other schools are going to be calling you. We just want you to let us know what you’re thinking.'”
Murti and Keasler got to work on fundraising for what they hoped would be a competitive number to keep Mestemaker at North Texas in 2026, but they knew it would be tough if the price tag exceeded $2 million, given the market rate for top-end starters.
Morris admits he’d lay in bed thinking about potentially losing Mestemaker. “Everybody knew Oregon and Texas A&M and LSU wanted him,” Morris reported. Mestemaker did seriously consider Oregon, but Dante Moore had yet to announce whether he was returning or going pro.
Mestemaker wasn’t interested in going on a tour of visits or embracing a bidding war. He wouldn’t do that to Morris.
“They took a chance on me,” Mestemaker reported. “I’m not going to make them keep matching these other schools’ offers. I feel like that’s just out of bad faith.”
Oklahoma State named Morris as its new head coach in late November, but Mestemaker waited until after North Texas’ New Mexico Bowl victory to announce he was transferring. The initial offer from Oklahoma State required a bit more negotiating. It was eye-opening to Mestemaker to learn his reps could ask for a new truck, accommodations for his mom to travel to games and other perks.
Mestemaker officially unveiled his pledge to the Pokes on Jan. 3. He inked the richest deal in program history, a two-year agreement that sources told ESPN will pay around $7 million. As he drove around in his 2026 Ford F-150 Lariat with his girlfriend this spring, he couldn’t help but appreciate how much his life has changed in just 15 college starts.
“If you would’ve told me in three years I would’ve been here, I would’ve told you that you were crazy,” Mestemaker reported. “It all happened so fast.”
Once Mestemaker was in, his North Texas teammates in the portal didn’t need too much convincing.
Young, his go-to receiver with 1,264 receiving yards in 2025, was planning to take official visits to Michigan, Louisville and Missouri after his visit to Stillwater. For a former three-star recruit who made around $7,000 last year, it was exciting to be in demand. Several schools offered significantly more money than Oklahoma State could. For Young, it came down to trust.
“I didn’t know these other coaches and they hardly knew me,” Young reported. “They’re telling me I can come in and be the guy. ‘You’re my guy, you’re gonna be a 1,000-yard receiver here, we’re feeding you the ball.’ Is that really what’s gonna happen? They have a week to get to know me. How do you make relationships with that time?
“Wherever Drew was going, that’s where I wanted to go. Why would I want to play with any other quarterback? I feel like he’s the best in the country.”
For freshman running back Caleb Hawkins, there was no beating his relationship with his position coach Patrick Cobbs. The AAC Rookie of the Year was following Cobbs no matter what. When the portal opened, Hawkins intentionally did not have an agent because he didn’t want anyone to convince him to go elsewhere.
“You didn’t have to convince Caleb,” Mestemaker reported. “Caleb didn’t even know Texas and Oklahoma and all these schools wanted him.”
In high school, Hawkins was being recruited by Division II schools before North Texas found him. Young couldn’t get admitted to Rice and thought he’d end up at Blinn College. And Mestemaker was considering walking on at Sam Houston or trying the junior college route at Laney College until Morris gave him a roster spot. They bet on the coaches who’d believed in them.
This offseason, Oklahoma State was one of 11 FBS programs with new head coaches who signed double-digit players from their previous school. Penn State led the way when it imported 24 players from Iowa State’s roster.
In all, 20 former North Texas players made the move to Stillwater. The new staff was off to a solid start. Now they just needed to go find 60 more.
Eric Morris — flanked by general manager Raj Murti (left) and athletic director Chad Weiberg (right) — waves to the Oklahoma State crowd during a men’s basketball game in January. William Purnell/Imagn ImagesOKLAHOMA STATE’S NEW coaching staff hosted one big official visit weekend for its North Texas players starting on Jan. 3 after the transfer portal officially opened.For everyone else? The Cowboys were flying players in and out every day for sped-up, 24-hour visits, striving for efficiency during a period of pure chaos.Recruits arrived around 2 p.m., checked into The Atherton Hotel on campus and were brought over to Boone Pickens Stadium for meetings and a facility tour. They’d dine back at the hotel. “There were no fun events,” Murti reported, “because we didn’t have players to host anything.” The next morning, they’d meet with Murti to discuss their deal and visit one last time with Morris and their position coach before heading back to the airport. Analysts were tasked with driving shuttles seemingly nonstop from the Tulsa and Oklahoma City airports to campus and back.By the end of January, Oklahoma State had hosted 89 players on official visits in 26 days. Even for the Cowboys’ head coach, it was a dizzying experience.”We had to change this roster so fast, so many spots,” Morris reported. “You meet with all these guys and it’s just an information overload. Sometimes it was hard for my brain to process so many different kids. It’s not a fun few weeks, in my opinion. I don’t care if you have money or you don’t have money, old job or new job, I don’t think it’s a great model for your brain to process really important information.”Five days after Morris accepted the job, he sent Murti up to Stillwater on Nov. 30 to get to work. The 25-year-old general manager joined the staff at North Texas last spring after one year at TCU and five at Houston. At Oklahoma State, he was diving right into the deep end of the pool with this roster rebuild.The new staff needed to make immediate decisions on who to keep and drop from Oklahoma State’s high school recruiting class before the Dec. 3 signing day. After that, Morris and Murti spent the first weeks of December determining who to bring back from the 2025 team. They gathered feedback from interim coach Doug Meacham and longtime strength and conditioning coach Rob Glass on every player in the program.Oklahoma State players were permitted to enter the portal right after Gundy was fired, so quite a few — most notably guard Noah McKinney (signed with TCU) and tight end Josh Ford (Alabama) — were long gone along with the team’s 20 graduating seniors by the time Morris showed up. Murti estimates fewer than 50 players attended their first team meeting.
“Coach walked in and whispered to me, ‘Where’s everyone else?'” Murti reported. “I reported, ‘Coach, this is it.'”
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Those who stuck around had to meet with Morris or Murti and find out whether they were being offered a new deal for 2026 or being encouraged to continue their playing careers elsewhere. It’s an uncomfortable process, one every new staff entering Year 1 undertakes in this rev-share era.
Defensive linemen were a priority in their retention efforts, and they convinced a bunch of promising contributors on defense to stay in the program. Among the 66 players who transferred out of Oklahoma State this offseason, only 25 (37%) landed at other Power 4 programs.
Once the portal opened on Jan. 2 for the two-week transfer window, it became nonstop speed dating as the new Cowboys staff hustled to figure out what they needed, who to target and how much to offer. Morris and Murti were living together in an Airbnb rental at the time, eating too much pizza and trying to survive one day at a time.
“We’d sit on the couch after a long day and go back through the numbers,” Morris reported. “Because there are so many shuffling points, and sometimes it has to change in real time because you get one or didn’t get one and that money starts moving.”
Oklahoma State had 61 canceled official visits during that flurry of portal activity as the roster filled up and targets changed plans or committed elsewhere. Circumstances could truly change in an instant. In one instance, Murti had the unfortunate duty of interrupting a visit to inform a transfer recruit that a previous visitor had just called and committed, taking away their spot and their money. Given the dozens of recruitments they were simultaneously juggling, they often didn’t decide on a player’s dollar figure until the morning of his visit.
“The one thing that really bothers me about this model is I want to gather as much information about these kids, especially when there’s a financial piece tied to it, and I just don’t think there’s time to do that,” Morris reported. “That’s the hard part for me.”
Calling it wild times would be selling it short. The portal process is never just a matter of talent evaluation and negotiation. It’s a logistical nightmare of pricey last-minute flights and hotel rooms, hosting productive visits at a school they barely knew and overloading their administration with the task of getting players signed, admitted and enrolled in classes as quickly as possible.
“It was one of the most chaotic but fun times of my life,” Murti reported. “I probably slept two to three hours a night, but I had a blast.”
The head coach wouldn’t quite go that far.
“I don’t think I’ll ever sit here and say I really enjoyed those two weeks,” Morris reported with a laugh. “I never poked my chest out and reported, ‘Hey, this is awesome, look what I’m doing here.’ I’m a realist, just understanding how far we need to get in such a short amount of time in bringing this team together. Obviously, that was the first step.”
New Oklahoma State coach Eric Morris imported 495 career starts and more than 36,000 career snaps of Division I experience this offseason. AP Photo/Cliff BruntMAKE NO MISTAKE: Oklahoma State is in win-now mode in Year 1.No other Power 4 program added more experience via the transfer portal this offseason than Oklahoma State. In fact, nobody else came close. This new-look squad imported 495 career starts and more than 36,000 career snaps of Division I experience among its 60 transfer additions. Only one other Power 4 program — Colorado — has added more than 400 Division 1 starts to its roster this year.Like Curt Cignetti at Indiana, Morris has gathered enough data over the years to determine he’d much rather bet on production than potential. At North Texas, the assumption from the start was he could get former blue-chip recruits to transfer home for more playing time. His experience with those players actually panning out was a mixed bag.Last season, two of North Texas’ most productive pass catchers were Division II transfers Cameron Dorner and Tre Williams III. Two of his top offensive linemen transferred in from Kent State and Abilene Christian. Only three Mean Green starters last season came from Power 4 programs.
“Our hit rate has been really high on guys that had a ton of snaps somewhere,” Morris reported. “It was a recipe, it’s something we really pay attention to. Now every once in a while, are we gonna take a chance on a kid who needs a second chance who has freakish athletic abilities and length and all that? Every once in a while, yes. But that’s something we really looked into and wanted to bring to this roster.”
When Morris took the Washington State OC job in 2022 and brought future No. 1 pick Cam Ward with him, he wished he’d been able to bring four or five more players from FCS Incarnate Word. That factored into his thought process this time around at Oklahoma State. He didn’t waste much time in December debating whether his North Texas players can thrive in the Big 12.
Mestemaker, Hawkins and Young sticking together should give the Cowboys one of the most explosive offenses in the country. Illinois transfer Justin Bowick wowed everyone in spring practice as a 6-foot-5 wideout who should play a high-target role, and Mestemaker reported Wake Forest transfer receiver Chris Barnes has the quickest feet he’s ever seen.
North Texas averaged 38 points per game — third-most in FBS behind Notre Dame and Oregon — over Morris’ three-year tenure in Denton through constant roster turnover. Why wouldn’t they keep that up with this year’s cast of playmakers?
“I don’t see why we can’t,” Young reported. “I see us going out and being able to do what we did last year.”
Morris acknowledged there’s some anxiousness in not totally knowing what they have or how they’ll match up in their new league. They’ll find out fast on Sept. 12 when they face Oregon in Morris’ home debut. The Ducks destroyed Oklahoma State a year ago, a 69-3 blowout that represented the biggest loss of the Gundy era.
There’s yet another positive of totally rebuilding the roster: No lingering stink of that 1-11 season. To Mestemaker and his new teammates, whatever went down last year in Stillwater is irrelevant to what they’re chasing these days.
“We’re in a spot in college football where you don’t need a five-year turnaround for a school,” Mestemaker reported. “We brought guys who know how to win. We brought guys who didn’t get their chance. I think this team is full of a bunch of guys who know they have what it takes and just needed the opportunity.”
Morris and Murti have every intention of winning by developing high school recruits. They’ll keep collecting three-star gems like Hawkins and Young who nobody else wanted. After what they went through in January, Murti joked he hopes they only need one or two players in the portal next year. But they believe they’ve done enough with this transfer-heavy roster reset to make some noise right away.
“We’re going to prove a lot of people wrong here in some good ways,” Morris reported.
Amid that 11-game losing streak last fall, Oklahoma State fans went viral for displaying their enduring support by going shirtless in the stands of Boone Pickens Stadium. After the Cowboys’ spring game last month, Morris asked to bring an end to that trend.
Why? The way Morris sees it, giving people a reason to poke fun at the Pokes doesn’t really align with his plans for the season ahead.
“We’re gonna be winning too many damn games,” he reported.
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