Drew Mestemaker completed 20 of 22 passes for 324 yards and five touchdowns in roughly two and a half quarters Saturday, a 90.9% completion rate and a 289.6 passer efficiency that set Oklahoma State single-game records, and the Cowboys beat FCS Murray State 59-0 in Stillwater. They scored on nine of their first 10 drives, the lone exception a Mestemaker fumble lost at the Murray State 21, and finished with 662 yards. Murray State never answered, managing 160 total yards and 0-for-12 on third down. Then Oklahoma State packed for Morgantown carrying a number none of that touched. The Cowboys have not won a Big 12 game since beating BYU in the final week of the 2023 regular season, an 18-game conference losing streak spanning all of 2024 and 2025.
Kickoff at West Virginia is Saturday at 7 p.m. ET on FS1. The model gives Oklahoma State about a 21% chance, which is the most pessimistic number you will see this week. Sportsbooks list West Virginia as only a small favorite, roughly a point and a half to two points, with a total near 60.5. Believe whichever you like. Both agree this is a game Oklahoma State can win.
What three games have and haven't proven
Eric Morris's imported North Texas offense opened the season looking nothing like its reputation. At Tulsa, Mestemaker went 29 of 49 for 241 yards with one touchdown and two interceptions, Caleb Hawkins carried 18 times for 79 yards, and the Cowboys ground out 368 yards on 86 plays, 4.3 per play, longest completion 27 yards. Three weeks later the same group is producing record efficiency. The gap between those two performances is the whole question of the season, and a Murray State box score does not settle it, because West Virginia is the first Big 12 defense this offense has seen.
Oklahoma State's job is to stay ahead of schedule on early downs. A Sports Illustrated matchup breakdown puts Hawkins, 1,434 yards and an FBS freshman-record 29 touchdowns at North Texas in 2025, against West Virginia tackles Jaylen Thomas and Nate Gabriel, and argues that bottling up Hawkins pushes Mestemaker into obvious passing downs against a pass rush that averaged more than two sacks per game last season. Second-and-9 is where this game gets decided.
That puts an unusual amount of weight on Shaun Torgeson. When Jacob Sexton's season ended with a lower right-leg injury suffered in the opener at Tulsa, Morris named Torgeson, a Portland State transfer, the starting left tackle for the Oregon game and said the job would go to whoever practiced best that week. It has stayed his. The Week 4 depth chart lists Torgeson as the solo starter at left tackle, no longer sharing the spot with Desmond Magiya. Mestemaker has been sacked once in the past two games. That is a real number and a small sample, and Thomas and Gabriel will test Torgeson far harder than Murray State did.
The parts that should travel
Skyler Cassity, who followed Morris from North Texas after cutting the Mean Green's scoring defense by nearly 10 points and their total defense by 90 yards per game in 2025, has quietly built the steadier half of this team. Against Murray State the work was spread out rather than concentrated. Cornerback Mo Horn had three tackles for loss and a pass breakup, safety Quentin Hammonds added two breakups, Malik Charles intercepted a tipped pass, and 23 different Cowboys recorded a tackle. Morris called the defense "phenomenal pretty much the entire game." The mirror-image matchup in Morgantown is Oklahoma State's front, Saadiq Clements, Jerry Lawson, Jaleel Johnson, James Williams, against West Virginia running back Cam Cook, who ran for 1,659 yards and 16 touchdowns at Jacksonville State in 2025. Contain Cook and West Virginia's less experienced quarterbacks have to throw on schedule.
Depth matters here more than the final score suggested. Morris spent the blowout on reps rather than style points, "We got a lot of kids action tonight, with a lot of guys getting game reps," he said, with second-, third- and fourth-string players getting limited playing time, while Joseph Hanson, Chris Barnes and Iman Oates sat out. A line that has been reshuffled repeatedly on the way into conference play needs those backups to have played.
Why this one, specifically
Oklahoma State's beat coverage describes West Virginia as possibly the Cowboys' easiest game on the Big 12 schedule on paper, since every other conference opponent finished 2025 better than West Virginia's 4-8, with the warning attached that losing here deepens the streak and dents the program's confidence. The venue is not the obstacle it sounds like. Oklahoma State has won its last two trips to Milan Puskar Stadium, 24-3 in 2021 and 48-34 in 2023; the recent loss in this series came at home, 38-14 in Stillwater in 2024, when Jaheim White ran for 158 yards and West Virginia piled up 558 total yards.
Nothing elsewhere on Saturday's board moves Oklahoma State's season. Everything that matters is on FS1 at 7, and it is the one result that would change how the next two months read.
Full matchup details are in the interactive guide, and the forecasting approach is explained in the methodology.