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Oklahoma State Football: Texas Staff Not Happy About Lack of Headsets During Game

By Kurt Freudenberger

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The fallout continues from the Oklahoma State football team’s bizarre and controversial win in Austin.

If you watched the game against Texas, you probably noticed plenty of talk about the headset situation going on with both teams.

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Early on in the game, the Oklahoma State sideline complained about their headsets not working, prompting the Texas coaching staff to remove theirs. Apparently that’s some sort of goodwill custom, as explained by the ESPN commentators during the game. The problems continued throughout the first half, and the Oklahoma State staff completely abandoned any hope of using them early into the second half, which in turn resulted in the Longhorns staff doing the same.

“I think the loss of headsets hurt us more than anything on Saturday,” Charlie Strong said during his Monday press conference.

Texas wide receivers coach and newly promoted offensive play-caller Jay Norvell wasn’t very thrilled about the situation either.

“Now you guys are the investigators,” Norvell said referring to media members that he addressed on Tuesday. “Who decides that you shouldn’t use the headsets? That’s the question that needs to be asked. We were ready to use them. That’s all I can say about that.”

Longhorn quarterback Jerrod Heard had a somewhat more positive view of the situation.

“Honestly it really didn’t affect me badly,” Heard said. “Having Coach (Shawn) Watson on the sideline, we were drawing stuff up on the board. It really helped a lot.”

Watson is the Longhorns quarterback coach, and former offensive play-caller who had his duties stripped away a few weeks ago after Texas’ loss to Notre Dame. He, like most offensive coaches, spends his time far above the action in the coach’s box, and had to come down to the field due to the lack of communication.

The thing that Charlie Strong and his staff are forgetting is the obvious fact that this was something that both teams had to endure. Texas having full and functional headset operation while the Cowboys were left to pretend it was 1952 would have been a huge and unfair advantage, given the situation. Things were made even with the Longhorns staff placing themselves in the same situation.

OSU offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich was also forced to come down to the field, something he’s never done as a coordinator. The third-year play-caller actually had to run down 10 flights of stairs with the rest of the Cowboys staff early in the third quarter during an Oklahoma State possession when he abandoned all headset hope.

Yurcich took it in stride.

“It was like a scrimmage back in the high school days,” Yurcich said to reporters earlier in the week. “So it was a little bit old school, but it was fun. Sure was good to be in the emotion of the game.”

Honestly, if Texas would’ve won, we likely wouldn’t be hearing any real complaints or passive-aggressive comments about the situation from their staff.

On the other hand, it is possible that Gundy and others on the Cowboys staff might have been the ones making negative comments about headsets if they were on the losing side.

Either way, it’s a moot point. The bottom line is that both teams were placed in the same situation, and both had to have offensive staff come to the sidelines. There was no advantage or disadvantage for anyone.

And that’s hopefully the last we ever hear about it.

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