Let's Dissect How Wrong Mike Gundy Is About His Latest Societal Observation

Great news, America. Mike Gundy is talking again.

Last month, the Oklahoma State head coach clumsily invoked A Few Good Men while addressing the spread of pre-game protests. It was the sort of in the sort of high-grade free association that only football coaches with the right blend of tenure and geography can pull off; Gundy seemed to view Jack Nicholson's character as the film's hero, but honestly it was pretty hard to follow beyond the fact that Gundy seemed upset about various things. Incoherence aside, it played with a certain sect of dog whistle aficionados and everyone else mostly tuned him out because. As with his touchstone "I'm A Man, I'm 40" explosion years ago, it was difficult to tell what Gundy meant, but easy to tell that he was extremely passionate about it.

On Monday, The Mullet From Midwest City had something else on his mind, and it is a doozy. Behold:

The use of the word "interesting" here is, let's say, extremely diplomatic. But, hey, shoot your shot, Mike:

Wut.

Definitely useful context, coach, thank you.

Needless to say, there's a lot going on here, and very little of it is on point. For starters, the entire premise is flawed, because there is no parity in college football. You do not need to be a college football coach to know this. You can just look at the week's scores, and see Alabama sweeping aside ninth-ranked Tennessee like a crumpled-up soda can and Ohio State outlasting a good Wisconsin team on the road despite turning in maybe 21 minutes of solid football. You can see Clemson remaining unbeaten despite hovering around comatose in every game besides their win over Louisville. The list of genuine national title contenders rarely fluctuates, not just from week to week, but from year to year. Only a handful of schools are capable of regularly importing the sort of elite talent it takes to maintain that constant push. This state of affairs is 1) undeniable and 2) does not outwardly appear to have much to do with smartphones.

And this is just college football's upper crust. Zoom out and the top 25 landscape is the same as it ever was. Power Five schools crowd the frame, with bluebloods like Florida (15), Oklahoma (16), and LSU (25) comfortably represented across the spectrum, along with mid-tier schools like Arkansas (17), Utah (19), and Ole Miss (23). The majority of the non-Power Five representation have been competitive for much of the last decade, from Houston (11) to Boise State (14) to Navy (24). Only PJ Fleck's Western Michigan (20) represents something truly unexpected.

Gundy doesn't offer a paradigm for what he considers parity to be—he doesn't even offer an explanation that suggests he knows the word's definition—so it's possible that he's referring to the abruptly declining fortunes of powers like Michigan State, Oregon, Notre Dame, and UCLA. Setting aside that at least one of those schools came into the year with ample warning signs, these schools are just replacing big-ticket bounce-back programs like Washington, Florida, Tennessee, and Miami on the margins. In other words, the best argument Gundy could feasibly muster for so-called "parity" amounts to an ongoing game of musical chairs among the sport's upper middle class, which has gone on pretty much forever.

That's only one part of the, uh, argument that Gundy appears to be making. There is also his belief that "focus and preparation is different now" because today's athletes "don't spend as much time around football." Which is something Gundy should know isn't true, because he works in college football. College programs regularly stretch the upper bounds of the NCAA-mandated limits for how much time athletes can spend on football activities. The players in those programs enroll as freshmen after years of 7-on-7 play and time on the ever-mushrooming summer camp circuit, developments that have bloated football from a fall sport into a year-long one. Gundy's grunting about how "my generation spent all of our time in the front yard playing games" isn't wrong, exactly, but it's the word "games" that matters here—as in, a plurality of activities and sports, not only football but baseball and basketball and whatever else. Today's youth athletes specialize more than ever, which means that they are almost certainly "around football" more than Gundy's generation ever was. If anything, cell phones actually exacerbate the issue. Ever since the NCAA allowed unlimited text messaging in April, people like Gundy can, and absolutely do, invade high school kids' private spheres at their leisure. Gundy acknowledged most of this a month ago; it's anyone's guess whether he remembers, or cares.

In either case, as with the rest of Gundy's pontificating, the monologue reveals far more about the speaker than the subject. Gundy is playing a character: a college football conservative who laments the decline of the good old days, despite the fact that he himself is not of that era. If that character comes off unconvincing or strange, it's because he's pandering in several directions at once. Gundy's personal aesthetic screams 1985, his worldview is proudly straight out of 1965, but his text messaging chops are peerlessly contemporary. It makes sense that he seems so confused—about the impact of generational attitudes on Kids Today, and in general—but it also probably doesn't matter much.

It doesn't matter because Mike Gundy is no thought leader or cultural critic. He is a pretty good football coach, and that's about that. There is no reason to listen to him talk about things unrelated to football games. There's no reason for him to talk about those things, either, but thankfully he has never let that slow him down.