Sports Illustrated took Oklahoma State football to the woodshed this week, submitting that the program had committed a litany of violations under former head coach Les Miles and current coach Mike Gundy.
Cleveland Browns quarterback Brandon Weeden spent five years in Stillwater under Gundy. He has not been mentioned in the first two installments of the five-part series (entitled “The Money” and “The Academics”), but he made his disapproval of the piece known on Wednesday.
“I’ve read the first story that came out and literally I laughed throughout the entire thing,” Weeden told reporters, via Cleveland.com. “It’s comical for a lot of reasons and I won’t go through the whole deal, but obviously it’s dealing more with before I got there. First of all, clean slate, I didn’t take any money or do anything like that. That wasn’t the issue.
“It all happened before I got there. But the guys that they did question were not very good sources to question because they are kids that got kicked off the team for drugs or for whatever it might be. They were dismissed and so these are guys that aren’t real credible.”
Weeden also took aim at SI’s Thayer Evans, one of the authors of the article, painting Evans as an Oklahoma Sooners fan with an ax to grind.
“The guy who wrote the article (Evans), we had a little run-in at Texas,” he said. “He’s an OU guy. He’s always had it out for Oklahoma State, so he comes up to me after we beat Texas and he said, ‘when’s it going to happen? When’s Okie State going to pull it’s Okie choke? Like they always do.’ I laughed and said, ‘Who is this clown?’ to our SID guys.
“And long story short the guy has always had it out for Oklahoma State. He’s got a track record. You can go look it up. I’m not going to say his name. You can go look and see what he’s done. But he’s had it out for us, so it’s comical. The truth will come out. I’m surprised. Here’s what I’m surprised about is that a credible institution like Sports Illustrated would do 10 months of investigation and they have no credible facts to go along with the story. ”
SI plans to release Part 3 (“The Drugs”) on Thursday, Part 4 (“The Sex”) on Friday and the final installment (“The Fallout”) in next week’s issue.
Photo via Facebook/Brandon Weeden
