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You never really know what to expect when a football coach holds a press conference. In most cases, it involves them giving fairly generic answers to equally generic questions, but there are also plenty of instances where they use those gatherings as an excuse to get some stuff off of their chest—which is exactly what Mike Gundy did when he reminded the world he’s A MAN in 2007.
Gundy’s infamous rant sits firmly alongside Jim Mora’s “PLAYOFFS?!?!?!” outburst and Dennis Green’s equally iconic “They Are Who We Thought They Were!!!” on the Mount Rushmore of Football Coach Freakouts (if I had to pick a fourth, I’d probably give the legendary Mora another spot on the monument thanks to his “Diddly Poo” comments).
I feel like virtually every college football fan out there is aware of the fateful day Gundy did his best impression of Will Ferrell reminding his dysfunctional family he drives a Dodge Stratus during a sketch on Saturday Night Live.
However, there’s a good chance you’re not intimately familiar with the series of events that led to the skipper losing his cool and treating us to a clip for the ages.
The newspaper story that caused Mike Gundy to freak out at the press conference where he yelled “I’M A MAN! I’M 40!”
In 2007, Gundy kicked off his third season at the helm at Oklahoma State. He’d previously served as the offensive coordinator under Les Miles, but after the head coach headed to LSU following the completion of the 2004 campaign, he became the 22nd person in program history to take the reins for the Cowboys.
Miles had posted a winning record in three of his four seasons in Stillwater, but he hadn’t exactly transformed OSU into a national powerhouse. Nobody really expected Gundy to do the same overnight, but he still had plenty of critics after going 4-7 in his inaugural campaign (including 1-7 in conference play) a year before leading the team to a 7-6 record and a win in the Independence Bowl in 2006.
It didn’t look like things were going to significantly improve in 2007. Oklahoma State opened up its season with a 35-14 loss to No. 13 Georgia, and while they bounced back with a 42-6 win over FAU the following week, they fell to 1-2 after dropping a game to Troy.
On September 22nd, the Cowboys improved to 2-2 with a win over Texas Tech in a game where quarterback Zac Robinson bounced back from a rough performance the previous week by throwing for 211 yards and passing for two touchdowns to help them walk away with the 49-45 win.
Robinson hadn’t been the starter at the beginning of the season, but Gundy and Co. opted to tap him to step up and replace QB Bobby Reid, who’d suffered a minor injury during the FAU game. It wasn’t entirely clear why the team made the switch, but on the morning of the Texas Tech game, Jenni Carlson of The Oklahoman penned a column where she asserted Reid had attitude issues.
It didn’t take long for Gundy to catch wind of the article and, well, he was not thrilled.
After the game, Gundy strode up to the podium with a copy of the newspaper in tow and used it as a springboard to go off on Carlson (and her editor at The Oklahoman) for running the article.
After claiming “3/4 of this is inaccurate,” Gundy became increasingly heated while unloading on the outlet for “attacking an amateur athlete for doing everything right” and advising them to go after him in the future instead because (as you know by now) “I’M A MAN! I’M 40! I’M NOT A KID!”
While most people praised Gundy for stepping up to defend Reid, the QB eventually said the head coach “basically ended my life” with the over-the-top defense he never wanted him to deliver in a public forum—especially a postgame press conference being broadcasted to the world—in the first place (his relationship with Gundy was already on the rocks, and he viewed the rant as a largely empty diatribe that wasn’t reflective of the reality he’d encountered during his time on the team).
It was certainly not the last time Gundy would get heated with reporters, but it’s certainly the most memorable.