Mike Gundy: Three down scheme encouraged him to hire Bryan Nardo as defensive coordinator

Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy revealed he brought in defensive coordinator Bryan Nardo due to his ability with the three-down package. It was something Gundy wanted his defenses to run in recent years, but they couldn’t quite get it to click. So after a long search, Gundy finally found Nardo ahead of the 2023 season.

Heck, the Cowboys leader almost went with a high school coach because it was hard to find a guy like Nardo.

“I wanted to be able to get into a little bit of three down,” Gundy said on Always College Football. “Ultimately I want to be versatile. We want to play three down, we want to play four down, but we don’t want to do too much of one or the other and not become effective at either. So when I started doing research there were not very many guys that knew the pure three down. Now, a lot of schools do it on passing downs, third and long and stuff, but to actually be involved in the x’s and o’s and understand three down calls, there weren’t very many guys. I felt like I interviewed just about everybody at the college level and above that understood the three-down package. 

“There were real quality guys in high school that knew it. A lot of them knew it better than college coaches. I was close to hiring a high school coach because I felt like he was really good and understood it. So we ended up with Brian.” 

Bryan Nardo was always the man for the job at Oklahoma State

Nardo goes into his second year in Stillwater after serving as the defensive coordinator at Gannon University in 2022. In his first year, Nardo’s defense ranked No. 2 in the country in fourth down defense, quite impressive.

“And somebody said there’s a young guy up at a small school in Ohio that understands this and someone contacted me and brought him down and flew him into Oklahoma City for an interview,” Gundy said. “Six hours later, we had him on the board and I thought this guy’s the best guy for the job. Now Brian, this is new to him. Most coaches that are his age, he’s in the mid-30s or something. They’ve got a long ways to go and he’ll improve this year compared to last year. 

“But he gave us the ability to implement some three down. The guys that were on our staff, we had Jim Knowles who was with us for four years and went to Ohio State. And his last couple years we were pretty good at four down and got what we wanted to get out of that package. So now we needed somebody to teach us three down.”

Bringing in a guy who was under the radar was risky, according to Gundy. But Nardo fit the bill and is poised to excel in Year 2 running the Oklahoma State defense.

“It was a risk and there was some give and take based on how much of it you want to work,” Gundy said. But long story short Brian came in, he’s taught us a lot about the three down. As the seasons went on, we started to integrate some three-down and four-down and hopefully that’s where we’ll be moving forward.”