Dave Hudson sheltered under a quilt with his sister, the little kids trying to avoid the cold and the rain.
That he failed to see much of the Oklahoma State football game their dad had brought them to didn’t matter much to Hudson. The Cowboys were terrible that long-ago season — but neither that nor the weather kept his dad from watching.
“He was loyal and true,” Hudson said. “An every-Saturday kind of guy.”
He was an OSU diehard.
Hudson became one, too, and for nearly two decades, he has surveyed fellow Cowboy fans before the football season to take their pulse on the program. His fan survey has gauged the state of State.
What started as a frustration for fan predictions on message boards has become an annual passion project.
A pretty darn good barometer of how the Cowboys will do, too.
“Over the long history of the survey,” Hudson told The Oklahoman, “OSU fans have been remarkably accurate at projecting how the team will actually perform.”
Aside from the past two miserable seasons, as Hudson calls them.
More on that in a minute.
“What’s kept me doing it all these years is that it works,” the 46-year-old Oklahoma City resident said.
“And I love OSU sports, of course.”
Heading into the first season under Eric Morris and the first season since 2005 without Mike Gundy as head coach, Hudson was curious what the 19th year of his preseason survey of Cowboy fans would reveal.
For starters, a whopping 1,180 of them participated. People who do surveys and polls generally believe several hundred respondents, 400 or 500, make for a good survey. So, nearly 1,200? We shouldn’t take Hudson’s survey lightly.
The biggest takeaway?
“This year’s numbers tell the story of a fan base that got its hope back,” Hudson wrote in his survey summary.
The responses revealed as much.
If you know anything about the past few seasons and the changes that Morris has brought, lots of the outcomes are what you’d expect. Fans think that the offense will be better, the defense worse. That the Cowboys are better positioned to compete in the NIL era. That wins against Oregon and Texas Tech top the fans’ wish list.
But the return of hope is seen in several ways, first and foremost in the predicted regular-season win total: 6.9.
Hudson reports that’s still a low number in the history of the survey. Only one year has been lower, that being last year. Fans thought the Cowboys would win only 6.4 games during the regular season.
Oh, that OSU had been that good.
Instead, the Cowboys stumbled to a one-win season, Gundy was fired less than a month into the season, and optimism was lower than a student’s bank account after a Saturday night on The Strip.
Even though the projected win total for this season isn’t much better, Hudson sees it as a good sign given the roster overhaul, the staff turnover and the first-time Power Four head coach now leading the program.
“The optimism that went missing in 2025 is back,” Hudson wrote, “even if the raw win total says fans are still being careful about how far to extend that optimism.”
Hey, who can blame Cowboy fans for that?
Each of the past two years, there was hope. Two years ago, coming off a trip to the Big 12 Championship Game, OSU fans thought the Cowboys would win 8.5 games; it won three. A year ago, even after Gundy nearly lost his job and was forced to flip his coaching staff, fans still predicted the Cowboys would win 6.4 games.
Now, some might say that’s a sign of an overly optimistic fan base, but during the duration of Hudson’s survey, the OSU faithful have been nearly spot on. Take out the last two seasons — who among us didn’t miss badly on how we thought the Cowboys would do? — and fans taking the survey predicted the Cowboys would win 134.6 games over the other 16 seasons.
OSU won 138.
“If anything,” Hudson wrote, “a little too cautious.”
Are OSU fans being cautious again this season?
Time will tell, of course. But hope has returned.
So has excitement.
Hudson asks fans this question to gauge their interest in the upcoming season: In the days and weeks leading up to this season, I have been (blank) than last year (reading articles, scanning message boards, talking to friends about the team, etc.)?
Possible responses include everything from “much more interested” to “much less interested.”
This year, 39% of fans said they were much more interested, the highest number in survey history. Another 31% indicated they were a little more interested. Having 70% of respondents in those top two categories is the most in more than a decade.
“On the other end,” Hudson wrote, “‘much less interested’ collapsed to just 3%, down from last year’s record-setting 16%. After 2025’s historic low enthusiasm, this is about as clean a reversal as you could ask for and about as strong a signal as any chart in this survey that the Morris hire has genuinely re-energized the fan base.”
Hudson feels it, too. He says he falls into the cautiously optimistic camp.
“I think we may see a return of the early Gundy days where we’d score 45 but allow 40 and win a nailbiter,” he said.
But …
“After the last two seasons, I’m just thrilled to have something to be excited about again.”
Dave Hudson became a fan when OSU football was not good, and he has remained loyal and true even as the Cowboys took a terrible turn these past few years. He’ll be at Boone Pickens Stadium, come rain or shine, cold or pleasant, good or bad, wins or losses. The only thing that changes is the weather-appropriate gear.
But according to his survey, this season he and other Cowboy fans aren’t just packing ponchos and parkas.
They’re bringing hope, too.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma State football fan base 'got its hope back,' according to survey
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