Oklahoma State Stuns No. 6 Oregon in College Football's Biggest Upset Yet

Oklahoma State beat No. 6 Oregon 39-31 at Boone Pickens Stadium on Saturday, a result that stood as the biggest upset of the young college football season and one of the more improbable reversals in recent Big 12 history. The Cowboys had been listed as 24.5-point underdogs against a Ducks team that entered the weekend ranked in the top six nationally, and they had not beaten a team from the Bowl Subdivision since September 2024.

The win, Eric Morris's first as Oklahoma State's head coach, ended Oregon's perfect 35-0 record against unranked opponents under coach Dan Lanning, a streak NBC Sports had tracked entering the weekend, and reversed the two programs' most recent meeting, a 69-3 Oregon rout in 2024 that stands as the largest margin of victory by Oregon over a Power Four opponent in program history.

The numbers

Oklahoma State outgained Oregon 554 yards to 281 and held a 25-12 edge in first downs, according to the official game summary posted by the NCAA. Quarterback Drew Mestemaker, a transfer from North Texas, completed 26 of 43 passes for 317 yards and two touchdowns and added 109 yards and a touchdown on the ground, including a diving 10-yard scoring run that put the Cowboys ahead 36-31 early in the fourth quarter after Oregon had briefly reclaimed the lead.

Oregon's Dante Moore finished 191 yards passing with two touchdowns, but he opened just 5 of 15 for 45 yards before rallying after halftime, by which point Oklahoma State had already built a 353-101 advantage in total yards. The Ducks' defense kept the game within reach for most of the afternoon, including a 96-yard interception return for a touchdown by linebacker Devon Jackson, but Oregon came up short on a fourth-and-8 conversion attempt from its own 33-yard line with seven minutes left while trailing 36-31, and running back Dierre Hill Jr. lost a fumble later in the drive that followed. No team had previously beaten a top-10 opponent while carrying a losing streak of 10 games or longer, NCAA.com noted in its roundup of the weekend's results, a distinction Oklahoma State now holds.

From a 1-11 season to a signature win

The upset capped an eighteen-month turnaround that began when Morris left North Texas to take over a Cowboys program that finished 1-11 overall and 0-9 in Big 12 play last season. He brought Mestemaker with him, a player who had gone unrated by recruiting services out of Vandegrift High School in Austin, Texas, and did not even start there. Mestemaker walked on at North Texas, redshirted in 2024, then threw for an FBS-leading 4,379 yards and 34 touchdowns as a redshirt freshman in 2025 before following Morris to Stillwater over offers from several Power Four programs.

Oklahoma State's rebuild had shown little Saturday-afternoon evidence before this weekend. The Cowboys opened this season with a 24-10 home loss to Tulsa, and Saturday's game marked only their second win over an FBS opponent since September 2024. The matchup also carried an unusual footnote tied to conference realignment: Oregon, now a Big Ten member, was making the conference's first-ever visit to Boone Pickens Stadium, a scheduling quirk that briefly obscured how ordinary a nonconference game this was expected to be.

Reaction and the rankings fallout

Oregon had already slipped from No. 2 to No. 6 in the preseason poll after needing a narrow escape against Boise State in Week 1, and Saturday's loss marked the first time Lanning's program had fallen to an unranked opponent. Lanning did not dispute the scoreline afterward, telling reporters in his postgame news conference, transcribed by Yahoo Sports, that his team had been outplayed across the board.

"All of that starts with me. Every bit of that starts with me. I didn't prepare our guys well enough to play."

Lanning added that Oregon "didn't have a lot of rhythm on offense" and gave up "way too many explosives" defensively, framing the loss as a coaching failure rather than a personnel one. Morris, for his part, struck a more measured tone than the scoreboard might have suggested, telling reporters the win was gratifying for a roster that had absorbed criticism after the Tulsa loss and cautioning that the challenge now shifts from proving doubters wrong to handling a new wave of praise.

The result affects both programs' postseason outlooks. Oregon, which had opened the year at No. 2 in the preseason AP Top 25 and had been positioned as a College Football Playoff contender out of the Big Ten, now enters a stretch of the schedule needing consecutive strong showings to steady its ranking. Oklahoma State, meanwhile, moves to 1-1 and re-enters conversations about the Big 12's middle tier, a modest but real shift for a program picked near the bottom of the conference in preseason polls.

What happens next

Oregon returns to Autzen Stadium on Friday, Sept. 18, to host FCS opponent Portland State in a game shifted to a Friday night window and broadcast on the Big Ten Network, an early opportunity to settle the offense before more consequential games later in the month. Oklahoma State stays home as well, hosting Murray State on Saturday, Sept. 19, in the first meeting between the programs and the only stretch of back-to-back home games on the Cowboys' schedule.

The AP Top 25 is next updated Tuesday, and Oregon's ranking is expected to reflect Saturday's loss, though by how much remains to be seen given the team's talent and profile entering the season. For Oklahoma State, the more immediate test is consistency: after last season's 1-11 finish, Morris and his staff now face the harder job of showing Saturday's performance was a foundation rather than an outlier before Big 12 play intensifies in October.