All but cleared by the NCAA of a wide variety of long-running rules violations, Oklahoma State head football coach Mike Gundy admitted he never read the articles that brought forth the allegations in the first place.
Speaking with the Associated Press, Gundy said he got the play-by-play from an assistant of allegations Sports Illustrated detailed. But Gundy also said the ensuing investigation was actually beneficial to his program.
"It's over now, and essentially, what it did was, it gave Oklahoma State a clean slate," he told the AP. "It let people know we're doing things the right way."
In Sept. 2013, SI published an investigative series of articles titled "The Dirty Game" in which Oklahoma State was accused of several NCAA rules violations from 2001 to 2010. The magazine said its reporters spoke with 60 former players who detailed drug use and academic fraud, as well as sex and cash as forms of payment, all under Gundy and former coach Les Miles' oversight.
"I never read any of them," Gundy told the AP. "My assistant read them, and she kind of told me what was going on, but I refused to read them because I knew they weren't true."
The NCAA opened an investigation and issued Oklahoma State University with a Notice of Allegations on Oct. 17, 2014. There were three allegations enclosed and they were all level II, which would warrant a two-year loss of up to two scholarships, ESPN reported at the time. SI has stood by its investigation all along, even after the NCAA deemed their report "fundamentally unfounded."
Gundy admitted the report's allegations made him feel vulnerable and he also thought during the NCAA's investigation that the potential punishment was going to be worse than it turned out being.
"When you investigate 12 years, give or take, and this is all they came up with at a big-time college football program who's won BCS bowls and had a lot of success - we should all be doing cartwheels and celebrating," Gundy said. "And that's the truth. And if it would have been something other, then I would have said, 'You know what? It is what it is.'"
