Mike Gundy On Running Back’s DUI Arrest: “I’ve Probably Done That A Thousand Times In My Life”

College football coaches love the performance of discipline for star players more than the discipline itself. They get to look like formidable leaders, but their priority is job security. When Oklahoma State running back Ollie Gordon II was arrested on suspicion of DUI recently, head coach Mike Gundy didn’t even bother with appearances. To explain his reasoning for not suspending Gordon, Gundy volunteered his own experiences of getting behind the wheel after having a few.

Early in the morning on June 30, Gordon was arrested near Oklahoma City with a blood alcohol level between 0.11 and 0.10. Gordon still showed up to Big 12 media days this week to give a brief, boilerplate apology, but Gundy held court for longer, downplayed the idea of any real discipline, and pondered the assumed universality of driving drunk.

“[Gordon’s] going to play,” Gundy said. “I’m going to do what we think is best for Oklahoma State football. And I think it’s best for Ollie to play. If there’s any punishment, it’s making him carry the ball 50 times in the first game.”

If you read that as Gundy perhaps not taking the dangers of drunk driving seriously, he made his position clear afterward. When asked about Gordon’s status and why he brought him to media day, Gundy said his running back got unlucky doing something he’d done often.

“So I looked it up on my phone, ‘What would be the legal limit?’” Gundy said Tuesday in a televised interview with ESPN. “Like, in Oklahoma, it’s 0.08 [percent]. And Ollie was 0.1 [percent]. So I looked it up, and it was based on body weight. Not to get into the legal side of it, but I thought, ‘Really, two or three beers, or four.’ I’m not justifying what Ollie did, I’m telling you what decision I made. Well, I thought, ‘I’ve probably done that a thousand times in my life, and you know it was just fine.’ So I got lucky. People get lucky. Ollie made a decision that he wished he could have done better, but when I talked to Ollie, I told him, ‘You’re lucky, you got out light.’”

Gundy’s legal analysis needs more work. The legal limit in Oklahoma is 0.08 for those 21 or older. For Gordon, who is 20, the legal limit is any measurable quantity of alcohol. Anyway, it would’ve taken less time if Gundy had plainly said he didn’t care. Making the 2023 Doak Walker winner come to media days is not a real punishment, nor is giving him the football a lot in the season opener. Every time Gundy brought himself to say that what Gordon did was bad, it was qualified. If Gordon weren’t a star, that’d make it easier for his coach to pretend he runs a no-nonsense program, but the handling of an All-America running back requires at least some nonsense.

Judging by the response to his remarks, Gundy was told to do damage control, Hours after the interview, he posted on Twitter that when he was talking about how he had drank a few beers and then driven many times in his life, it was just a figure of speech. “My intended point today at Big 12 media days was that we are all guilty of making bad decisions,” Gundy wrote. “It was not a reference to something specific.” Also, when I say that mullets are a bad look for some college football coaches, because they make their heads look swollen and weird, it’s not a reference to something specific.