Mike Gundy is a man. He's 58. Is it time to come after him?

Sing along. You know the tune.

I want to talk about this game right here. If anybody hasn’t seen this game — it was a 19-12 loss by Oklahoma State to Tulsa — this loss was brought to us by a father. Of children. I think this is worth reviewing. Let me tell you why I want to talk about this game. Three-fourths of this was a butt-kicking before Oklahoma State woke up in the fourth. It’s so unbelievable you’d think it’s fiction. Tulsa winning in Stillwater for the first time since 1951 embarrasses the fans involved with Oklahoma State football — tremendously.

That game had to have been coached by an all-time great who hasn’t adapted to a rapidly changing sport. A coach who would have taken his team to the national title game in 2011 if not for a Friday night upset. A coach who took over at his alma mater when it was a perennial also-ran and then turned it into one of the most consistent winners in the country for a decade. And he also hunted rattlesnakes.

Here’s all that the coach did. He found hidden gems. He developed them. He raised his program’s floor in ways no one dreamed possible 25 years ago. But he’s a professional; he makes $6.75 million a year. He deserves to be criticized when he isn’t earning that salary.

If you have an all-time great coach someday, you’ll understand how it feels to watch him go over a professional cliff. But maybe you don’t have your best coach ever down so bad that he’s getting clobbered by Oregon and outclassed by a Tulsa team starting its backup quarterback. Oklahoma State does.

If your coach goes down the street and somebody makes fun of his mullet or yells at him for flirting with every open job for 10 years or gets mad because he said they couldn’t pay their own bills, you’d understand. But you don’t have that coach. Oklahoma State does. Someday, you might. And when your coach wins big but irks the fans and then decides for three seasons not to pay players from the transfer portal when everyone else does, you’ll understand.

If you want to go after a coach — one of everyone’s favorite coaches — you go after one that overhauled his coaching staff this offseason, yet still got out-recruited and out-schemed by the guy who just came to Tulsa from East Tennessee State and still has time to maintain a 1.3 handicap on the golf course. You don’t downgrade that coach just because he got smoked by Oregon. You downgrade him because he got beaten at home by a team that lost at New Mexico State two weeks ago. And now Oklahoma State leaders have to make a decision.

That’s why Oklahoma State fans might not want to watch these games. Losing to Tulsa at home is garbage. And the coach who would let his team play like that? We’ll let Oklahoma State’s administration decide what it thinks he is now.

Oklahoma State attacked this professional coach in the offseason. The people in charge gave him an ultimatum. Either he took a pay cut and a buyout cut or he got fired, because he wasn’t doing anything right. He took the pay cut, and then we wrote articles about how he might turn it around because he always seemed to make the right calls before. Every time his back was against the wall, he rallied. Not this time.

Are you kidding me? Losing to Tulsa at home after getting beat 69-3 in Eugene? GO AFTER THAT COACH! HE’S A MAN! HE’S 58! He’s not a kid. Make a decision. Don’t let this program keep spinning its wheels. IT’S TOO SAD! And don’t say it’s because others are better at buying players, as if it’s not perfectly within the rules to do so. TULSA CAN’T PAY LIKE OKLAHOMA STATE CAN! So get your facts straight.

And I hope someday you have an all-time great coach and he loses his fastball and you have to look him in the eye and say, “Thank you for everything you’ve done for us. But we’ve paid you fairly, and you’re not doing the job effectively anymore.” And then you hand him $15 million dollars to not coach and hope he’s not still mad when you want to name the field after him.

That’s what Oklahoma State leaders have to decide if they want to say. This probably makes them want to puke.

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