“As soon as I said it, I knew I messed up,” Gundy said. “That's the first thing that came to my mind. I didn't want to say ULL, because it's a tongue twister, so I just fired ‘Lafayette' off.”

During the opening statement of his Monday press conference, the Oklahoma State coach said his staff had begun watching film on the Cowboys' next opponent. He called the school “Lafayette.”

Yes, the name of the school that comes to Stillwater this Saturday is the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. But in recent years, it has started to call its athletic teams “Louisiana's Ragin' Cajuns” — and has asked others to do the same.

“It's not that we're changing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,” sports information director Brian McCann said. “That is the name of our school. It's just that in referring to our athletic programs, sometimes you want to simplify it so people understand.

“We just thought that if you go Louisiana-Lafayette, it kind of clutters things up a little bit. We just want something a little simpler, a little faster. That's why in keeping with the spirit from the state, ‘Louisiana's Ragin' Cajuns' fits.”

Name changes over time are natural in the worlds of academia and athletics. Oklahoma A&M became Oklahoma State in the 1950s when the school wanted to show that it had broadened its curriculum. And its athletic nicknames have ranged from Aggies, Agriculturists and Tigers before the Cowboys. Gundy even remembers a time when some people on campus attempted to start a revolution to change the “OSU” abbreviation to “O State”