Oklahoma State football, Wisconsin face 'a tough situation' with transferring QBs

STILLWATER — When the introductory press conference for the Guaranteed Rate Bowl began at 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Oklahoma State and Wisconsin each had multi-year starting quarterbacks with a combined total of nearly 15,000 career passing yards.

Within 24 hours, both were in the transfer portal.

The Cowboys and Badgers will meet in the bowl game at 9:15 p.m. on Dec. 27 at Chase Field in Phoenix, giving them plenty of time to prep their new starters.

OSU’s Mike Gundy and new Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell understand the world in which they operate amid the current landscape of college football, with the transfer portal and name, image and likeness opportunities aplenty for players.

But that doesn’t make it any easier.

The transfer portal has become yet another difficulty in managing a college football roster, and the quarterback position is perhaps the toughest spot.

More:Tramel: How Spencer Sanders broke an Oklahoma State football trend with portal move

“The numbers game is difficult in general,” Gundy said on Sunday, a day before Sanders’ official announcement that he was entering the portal. “There’s players moving around, it’s all over the country… To the extent of how to prepare for the next year, how to keep your depth chart up to par, it’s extremely difficult, in being that sometimes you have surprises.

“The one difficult position is the quarterback position, because they’re more active (on the portal) than any other position, based on, in most cases, only one guy plays.”

In the past, Gundy has had to work to rebuild his depth chart behind an established starter. The Cowboys only had two scholarship quarterbacks (Sanders and true freshman Garret Rangel) plus a scholarship-worthy walk-on in Gunnar Gundy after Shane Illingworth transferred to Nevada last January.

But this is a different scenario, with the starter leaving.

Gundy said earlier this year he’d prefer to limit his number of scholarship quarterbacks to three at a time. That allows for the development of young backups but avoids having guys buried so deep on the depth chart that they bail before they get a chance.

OSU has one quarterback committed in the 2023 recruiting class, Zane Flores of Gretna, Nebraska. It is yet to be seen if Gundy would choose to do some transfer portal shopping with a glut of quarterbacks on the market.

As for the bowl game, Gundy is in a better situation than Fickell. Former Badger starter Graham Mertz announced his plan to enter the portal while Fickell was fielding questions from the media in the bowl press conference.

More: How Garret Rangel's 'heart of a lion' helped him persevere in starting opportunities this season

For OSU, Rangel started two games and Gunnar Gundy one, throwing a combined 123 passes, with Rangel being the anticipated starter in the bowl game.

Outside of Mertz, Wisconsin has three players who together attempted 14 passes this season.

“I just got off the phone not too long ago with him,” Fickell said of his conversations with Mertz. “It’s a tough situation. He knows that. We encouraged him to stick around here and wait and see how the changes go, but at some point in time, some of those guys feel like this is something they need to do.

“Does that open up some things for us? Yeah, I think that’s one of those unique things, that we’ve got an opportunity with bowl practices to find out what we’ve really got and have had behind him. That’s what we’ll do.”

Oklahoma State has seen 10 players enter the transfer portal already, including Sanders, leading rusher Dominic Richardson and leading tackler Mason Cobb. As of Wednesday, the recruiting class consisted of 12 committed players, and one newcomer from the portal, Tulsa linebacker Justin Wright.

So Gundy and his staff have some recruiting work to do, both with high school players and via the transfer portal, simply to get to the 85-scholarship limit.

“If you get a number of surprises late, it can really throw you a curveball,” Gundy said. “It is one of the more challenging things we’re doing right now.”

Guaranteed Rate Bowl

OSU VS. WISCONSIN: 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 27, at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. (ESPN)

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This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Without Spencer Sanders, bowl a glimpse of OSU Cowboys football future