STILLWATER, Okla. — It didn’t take long for Eric Morris to understand just how much work needed to be done at Oklahoma State.On Dec. 7, 2025, less than 48 hours after he wrapped up his final game at North Texas, Morris gathered his new team together. The meeting room, which seats roughly 200 people, wasn’t even a quarter full.Major college football rosters have more than 100 players, but there weren’t even 50 present when Morris first spoke as the team’s new head coach. Some had already entered the transfer portal, and many more were planning to do so.“I remember FaceTiming the guys back in Denton immediately after it happened,” said Raj Murti, Morris’ general manager at North Texas and now at Oklahoma State. “They asked, ‘How was the first team meeting?’“I said, ‘Guys, there’s no one here. We need a whole team.’”The next seven weeks were a whirlwind as Morris, Murti and the Oklahoma State staff constructed one of the biggest and swiftest roster overhauls in college football history. When the dust settles in August, the Cowboys will have 87 new players, tying Deion Sanders’ 2023 Colorado squad for the most newcomers in the transfer portal era.The goal is to turn a team that cratered in the final years of the Mike Gundy era — going winless in league play each of the last two seasons — into a legitimate Big 12 championship contender, not just in 2026, but for years to come.“We needed a clean slate,” Morris said.Under Gundy, Oklahoma State became a consistent winner. The former Cowboy quarterback took over a program in 2005 that was sub-.500 all-time before his arrival (471-522-48) and transformed it into a modern success story. After going 170-90 in 21 years — making him the winningest coach in school history by more than 100 victories — Oklahoma State is on the right side of the all-time win column (641-592-48).But cracks in the foundation began to show in recent years, and things quickly unraveled after Oklahoma State won 10 games in 2023 and appeared in the Big 12 Championship Game. The Cowboys went 3-9 in 2024, ending the season with nine consecutive losses. In 2025, their only win came against an FCS school. They lost at Oregon 69-3 in Week 2, and after a 19-12 loss to Tulsa in the next game, Gundy was gone.Quarterback Drew Mestemaker and running back Caleb Hawkins are two of the 19 transfers who followed coach Eric Morris from North Texas. (Bryan Terry / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)The reasons were plentiful, but the program’s failure to adapt to the rapidly evolving roster management space, from how they used the transfer portal to what they were willing to spend on NIL, was near the top of the list. Last season, Oklahoma State had what some rival personnel directors deemed the worst roster in Power 4 football.That’s what made the clean slate Morris referenced so necessary. Before overhauling the roster, Morris did the same with the staff. All the on-field coaches are new. “No holdovers except one off-the-field guy,” Morris said. “We needed people that believed in my vision.”There were several members of the 2025 team that Morris would have liked to retain but couldn’t due to budgetary reasons. Signing transfers costs significantly more than high school recruits, and having to court so many meant Oklahoma State had to be mindful of how and where it spent its money.“The bigger (the roster flip), the harder it gets because getting kids from the portal, it’s more expensive than doing it the other way,” Morris said.But Morris was going to err on the side of newcomers based on his past head coaching experience and discussions with others who have been in similar situations.“Talking to coaches in the portal era, taking over clubs who weren’t very good, they always wish they had cleaned out more when they were rebuilding something,” Morris said. “That’s something multiple coaches said to me.”Among the 87 newcomers, one held the key to the entire rebuild: quarterback Drew Mestemaker.Mestemaker, who broke onto the scene as a redshirt freshman last year at North Texas, has a unique story. He was never a full-time varsity starting quarterback at Vandegrift High in Austin, Texas. He walked on at North Texas after a recommendation from Jeff Christensen, a longtime private quarterback coach whom Morris knows from his days at Texas Tech with Patrick Mahomes, a Christensen client.