I guess you can chalk this up to much ado about (mostly) nothing.
In a mid-June interview, Oklahoma State athletic director Mike Holder seemed to take a shot at his head football coach’s recruiting prowess, saying he “wants to finish higher in those... rankings than we consistently do.” After not saying much publicly since, Mike Gundy seemed to stoke that fire a little further during the Big 12 Media Days Tuesday by tersely declining to answer a question posed to him about that situation.
Not long after he was away from the podium, however, Gundy completely diffused any type of lingering issues over the comments.
“I knew what he was trying to say,” Gundy said by way of ESPN.com. “He just didn’t do a good job of getting the information out there. That’s the same thing I told him. He was very apologetic. I said, ‘Coach, I know exactly what you were trying to accomplish. You don’t have to worry about me.’
“It’s difficult to say the right thing all the time.”
Gundy added that Holder “just doesn’t have a way of saying things that fit in the society today where people understand. He’s just very, for a lack of a better term, old-school in his approach.”
The 69-year-old Holder -- he’ll turn 70 in mid-August -- has been the AD at OSU since 2005. That was the same year Gundy took over as the head football coach at his alma mater. In those 13 seasons, Gundy has led the Cowboys to a 114-53 record overall and a 69-42 mark in Big 12 play.
On June 13, it was announced that Gundy had reached an agreement on a new contract that would keep him in Stillwater through the 2023 season. Nine days later, it was announced that Holder was on the receiving end of a contract extension through the 2021 season.