Every college athletic director everywhere dreams of having a booster like T. Boone Pickens. A lot of schools have to slum it around, picking up donations of $1 or $2 million at a time. That’s chump change, lawya; Pickens dropped $165 million (!) on Oklahoma State not so long ago, a donation designed to pay for football stadium renovations and an “athletic village” to shame even the most humble of Chinese Olympics organizers. Pickens keeps his donation game tight.

Unfortunately, it appears much of that donation was kept, for expansion purposes, in T. Boone’s hedge fund. The market has not been kind to that scrill:

Darren: If I’m a fan of Oklahoma State and want that money to grow, what am I rooting for to happen?

Pickens: Well, 10 percent of the fund is in raw commodities and we’re either long or short oil or long or short natural gas. Then, 90 percent of the fund is in equities, the stock market. It’s a long-biased portfolio, so fans should be pulling for oil and gas equities — you know the ones that have taken the biggest hit — and their probably pulling for the price of oil and natural gas to go up. But not right now. We’re actually out of the market right now. So I’m not in the market. So for now, I want those prices to come down.

Darren: You said on CNBC earlier this month that 15 percent of investors that are in your BP Capital have expressed they might want to take their money out by the end of the year. Is that an option for the Oklahoma State athletic department?

Pickens: We’ve leveraged the money I donated to build. But there’s a certain point where they may have to exit the funds.

Darren: How much are they considering that?

Pickens: We’re at a critical point right now.

Ahh, hmm, yeah. This is awkward, but T. Boone? This is OSU. Hey. Do you think we could get that $165 million back? We probably should have just had you cut a check in the first place, but you know, we didn’t want to impose … no, sure, we understand … but here’s the thing: Give us that money. The precious. We … we needs it.

In exchange, we’ll force another four hundred freshman to “volunteer” for the Pickens Plan? Deal?