Something’s got to give.

No. 17 Boise State is averaging 59 points a game and No. 24 Oklahoma State is averaging 56.5 points per game. Boise State is giving up on only points per game and OSU is surrendering only 15 points per game.

Boise State comes to Stillwater at 2:30 p.m. Saturday for a meeting between two high-powered offenses and two pretty good defenses.

The Bronco’s victories did come against mid-majors Troy and Connecticut and the Cowboys beat Missouri State and South Alabama. Neither team has played a top-level team yet.

“We are very excited. We are just going to treat it like a regular team,” said BSU wide receiver A.J. Richardson. “We’ll go in and practice hard. I think that is where it has been paying off for us.”

“You win by 40 points that’s a heck of a deal but we need to be a more disciplined team and so that starts with me, and I’ll get that through to the coaches and we’ll get that passed along,” said OSU coach Mike Gundy. “And we’ll need to play better, as I said a couple weeks ago, each week they get better, the next team we’re playing is a really good football team so we’ll need to play a lot better in all those areas that I just mentioned.”

OSU quarterback Taylor Cornelius had a great game against South Alabama last Saturday. Cornelius hit 25 of 40 passes for 428 yards and one touchdown.

“He was better,” Gundy said of Cornelius. “He had a poor throw, if I was him I would not scramble on every throw to the right in the end zone again, the rest of his career, I would just run it. Two of his worst throws in his career have been that play. But he was a lot better tonight. He threw the ball well.”

Cornelius credited the play of the whole offense.

“The receivers went out and made plays, our offensive line did a great job and our running backs did a great job out of the backfield all night long,” said Cornelius. “I definitely felt more comfortable this week. It’s still not exactly what we wanted with two interceptions, but I felt more comfortable out there and feel good after two weeks.”

Cornelius criticized OSU’s mistakes.

“We just need to clean up our turnovers and limit the number of penalties we have,” he said.

Cowboy Tylan Wallace caught 10 passes for 166 yards and one score. Tyron Johnson had 137 yards on five catches. These were career highs for both Wallace and Johnson.

“They have a pretty explosive offense,” said South Alabama safety Tobias Moss. “They do a lot of things where they try to get their receivers some space to try to get the ball to them. Overall, we made a lot of mistakes. They made some plays that capitalized off them. They made more big plays than us.”

OSU offensive Coordinator Mike Yurcich said Johnson and Wallace have to be consistent for OSU to be successful.

“Those guys got to win,” Yurcich said. “You see it every game, there’s always a play that’s one-on-one and they’ve got to win that matchup. We’re glad that we have a lot athleticism as a whole that we can win those battles. We’ve got to continue to improve at that position.”

Wallace was glad the South Alabama defense opened up the passing game.

“The defense that South Alabama was running just gave us some opportunities to throw the ball deep,” Wallace said. “Last week, Missouri State didn’t really let us throw it around that much, so we just went out there and made the plays that we knew we could make.”

Wallace complimented Cornelius.

He throws a great ball to all of the wide receivers and I couldn’t ask for a better quarterback to play with,” Wallace said.

Yurcich said OSU will have difficulty against Boise State if the mistakes continue.

“Anytime you play a good team, those mistakes get maximized,” Yurcich said. “You can’t get behind the chains, no penalties, no negative yardage plays. You want to stay on schedule. You want to play with tempo. All of those things that make good offenses good. We want to work on making sure we’re executing the base fundamentals of this offense.”

South Alabama did well defending the OSU run game, holding the Cowboys to 164 yards. OSU running back Justice Hill did score twice on runs. And Oklahoma State outgained South Alabama 617-214 yards in total offense.

“We’re not run blocking very well,” Gundy said. “Run blocking was below average, didn’t give our guys a chance really. They played a lot of low safeties, they were way down in there. We managed to throw for a lot of yards, but we still don’t run the ball well enough in my opinion to be successful in the long run. So we have a lot of improvement in that area.”

Gundy said OSU can’t be so one dimensional.

“There are times we’re going to have to run the ball when they say you can’t run it,” Gundy said. “You have got to be able to run the football, and we couldn’t do that tonight.

“The way their safeties and linebackers were playing, you’re limited in some of the things you can do, but you have to be better at it than what we did. There’s nobody covering the middle of the field, so you can throw the ball in the middle of the field pretty much any time you want. We’re going to play some teams that might be good enough to play that way and then minimize what we get on the perimeter, so there’s times you got to be able to rush the football four yards-per-carry.”

The Cowboys finished with 11 tackles for loss, with 13 different players being credited with stops behind the line of scrimmage.