Ground Zero, Pickens State
By Berry Tramel The Oklahoman:
'OWNER' KEEPING OSU COMPETITIVE
Here’s the best way to think of Oklahoma State football.
Mike Gundy is coach. Athletic director Mike Holder is general manager. OSU president David Schmidly is president.
Boone Pickens is owner.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
If you’re one of those OSU fans who decry the school’s sellout to commercialism, one of those fans who recoil when a foe chants “Pickens State,” one of those fans who say they simply want their university back, I have a solid alternative for you.
Conference USA. Without Pickens and his hundreds of millions, ...OSU athletics would belong in a league with Rice and Memphis.
...This is 21st century reality. ...[C]ollege football demands megabucks, and a school that just a few short years ago was wallowing in debt has a benefactor willing to give the Cowboys an engine in this arms race.
...Is this seemly for a college campus? Is that ideal for the ivory towers?
No. But that's the real world, a world in which Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech and Texas A&M have all completed football cathedrals in the last five years.
UD sees a subterranean struggle in here between what Stendhal called "the red and the black." Army or church? Boone Pickens is "willing to give the Cowboys an engine in this arms race," but the enemy has built "football cathedrals." Is the college stadium a field of battle, or is it Chartres?
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