Given everything that’s happened in and around WSU over the past 18 months, a lot of folks have taken to resigning themselves to an extremely pessimistic view of the future of WSU athletics. It’s become a sort of race to the bottom to declare us a better fit for the Big Sky than the Power 4, and the rhetoric really went into overdrive a couple of weeks ago when Jake Dickert ran away from WSU as fast as he could and then decided to repeatedly shit on the school that gift wrapped his first head coaching job from 3,000 miles away.

Waving a white flag about [GESTURES WILDLY AT EVERYTHING] when the fight is just getting started is puzzling to me, but I will admit that even the most optimistic of us have had to fight back bleak thoughts about what all of this might eventually mean for the school we love. It’s a scary time, and I don’t blame anyone who looked at Dickert leaving for one of the worst P4 jobs in the country and wondered: What are we even doing here?

But as I watched new football coach Jimmy Rogers introduce himself to the WSU community last week, I found myself continually coming back to one question:

If the trajectory of WSU athletics really is as bad as so many folks say, would Rogers be our football coach right now?

Usually, that kind of reasoning comes into play when a coach with an unimpeachable pedigree comes to a school — like, for example, how hiring Mike Leach changed the way we thought about what was possible for WSU football. That’s not the case here; we hired an FCS coach (which is always risky), at a salary that’s about a million less than what his predecessor was making (which looks bad). That would cause outsiders to say: Well yes, actually, the trajectory is definitely that bad!

But that’s not the way I was thinking of that question.

For starters, I don’t see hiring an FCS coach at WSU as inherently bad, nor do I find the salary problematic. WSU has had historical success with I-AA/FCS coaches¹, and Rogers’ salary ($1.57 million) is pretty run of the mill for someone coming up from FCS. Spending an extra million on the salary just for appearances is stupid, not ambitious; beyond that, I don’t think spending an extra million on a different coach necessarily gets you a million in marginal value for the program. If Rogers is your guy, he’s your guy.

But I digress. Back to the original question, which I ask because I’m not sure it’s possible at this point to believe that Rogers would leave what was a pretty cherry situation at South Dakota State for an obviously sinking ship.

In a statement reminiscent of Leach’s introduction 13 years ago,² Rogers said:

“I'm not unaware of kind of all the critiques of Washington State,” he said. “I also don't care about them. I don't care what people think of me, either. I was entrusted to do a job, and I'm going to do it at the highest level I possibly can.”

Whether you’re buying that probably depends on a couple of things: 1) How much you know about Rogers’ history, and 2) Whether you were able to watch the press conference.

If you weren’t able to do the latter, it’s worth your while. There is an unvarnished authenticity to way he speaks that stands in stark contrast to his predecessor. It will leave you believing that, no, he actually does not care what people think:

As for the former, you probably at least know the broad strokes of Rogers’ career at this point: He spent 18 of the last 19 years at FCS South Dakota State, first playing linebacker, then starting coaching after he was done playing (with a short, 1-year detour to Florida Atlantic as a grad assistant), working his way up from the very bottom to become defensive coordinator, getting promoted to head coach two years ago, and promptly winning a national championship before taking a step back this year by “only” making it to the FCS semifinals.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Rogers was SDSU’s golden boy. He was the hand-picked successor to the school’s most successful coach, John Stiegelmeier, and the first two seasons of his tenure did nothing to dissuade the notion that he was prepared to carry the torch; fans of the team are absolutely crushed that he left.

If Rogers’ goal all along was to climb the coaching ladder such that he could jump to the first viable FBS job before age 40, he sure went about it an extremely weird way.

Because of that, I’m not convinced that this move — even with its 500%+ salary increase — was a no-brainer for Rogers. I believe him when he says he loved South Dakota State; 18 years attending and/or working at the same institution in a town of 24,000 is pretty solid evidence of that. That’s not something you can fake. Everything was in place for him to continue to win games there at a high rate, and at 37 years old, there’s a decent chance he could have run that program for literal decades, if he so desired. It also means that if moving to FBS was always something he would want at some point, he didn’t have to do it now, for WSU — there would almost certainly be more opportunities to do that, too.

Jimmy Rogers left what has been his home since he was a teenager, abandoning what had to be a dream job, and invited all the ire of a jilted fanbase with which he had deep personal ties. There’s no chance whatsoever that he would go through all that to lead a program sliding toward inevitable irrelevance.

Either athletics director Anne McCoy is the greatest salesperson ever, able to paper over all our shortcomings … or Jimmy Rogers knows something that Jake Dickert could never conceive: That Washington State is, in fact, on an upward trajectory that should excite a coach.

“This program has so much more to give, and I look forward to tirelessly working this program into becoming a national contender,” he said. “I didn't come here to lose. And to this coaching staff [that followed him from SDSU]: I believe in this. I believe in this.”

You should believe it in it, too.

It can be tempting to write off this sort of speak as standard coach fare; nobody takes a new job thinking they’ll be unsuccessful, and that’s doubly or triply true of high-level coaches. And, as fans, we can talk ourselves into just about anything — we were all in on Dickert, until we weren’t. Copium and hopium are incredible drugs, for sure.

But where we hoped that Dickert was a man of substance behind all the rah-rah videos, there’s reason to believe that the authenticity that seemed to be on full display with Rogers is actually … well … authentic. He was emotional and unpolished as he spoke, sometimes stumbling over his words a bit. But on the important points, he was direct and clear, speaking like an archetypical coach out of central casting for Friday Night Lights or something.

And ooooooooh boy did he want to make it very, very clear that he is not his predecessor. (Emphasis mine in these quotes)

Theses kinds of direct and indirect shots at the previous coaching staff and the state of the program are not the kind of things you normally hear from one coach to another. The guys in that fraternity typically bend over backward to be complimentary of each other, even if they feel differently on the inside. Clearly, Rogers is not a man who is going to sugar coat anything, for anyone.

“I take all of these things really personal,” Rogers said. “People believe in me, and I'm going to show them that their belief is is warranted.”

Rogers sees the possibilities in what is to come rather than lamenting what was lost. I don’t necessarily blame Kyle Smith and Dickert for feeling like their careers were going backward to some degree and looking for other opportunities; again, my issues with Dickert stem solely from the representation of who he was vs. who he actually is.

As WSU moves into the next phase, I think it’s not just cool, but actually pretty darn important that the two most high profile programs are now being led by two men who want to be here. Rogers went on and on about how much he adored Pullman:

“If that (first) interview (with WSU) didn't go the way I thought it would have, I probably wouldn't have thought (for a) second about the other one (with WSU),” he said. “I've had a lot of opportunities in my life to say no. I've been blessed because of who I've been around, and after that interview I felt the passion from them that this place is really special. I felt like it was a passion where myself and my wife can take this next journey of our life and and raise our kids here.”

Again, if you’re tempted to also call that coach speak … well, I’d encourage you to learn some things about Brookings, South Dakota. Someone who spends a bunch of years there, then leaves briefly, then comes back to spend a bunch more years, and — after nearly two decades there — chooses his next job in a place that’s basically just like it … I mean, clearly he knows what he’s getting himself into, and knows what he’s saying when he says he can raise a family there.

“I'm really about people, okay? And so when I took the interview at Washington State, the first thing that struck me right away was the people that I was on that interview with, their passion for Washington State — not just the university but the football program, the entire athletic department, and really the the the community of Pullman,” he said. “Just hearing their vision of what it was is much like the place that I just left. And I could feel the excitement about them wanting to get to know me and wanting to know more about how I've done it, and that inspired me that they were open to listening to the future of what Washington State football could be.”

It’s going to take uncommon energy and enthusiasm to get WSU over the hump and into our new reality, and both he and men’s basketball coach David Riley seem to have that. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both are exceptionally young for their jobs, and I think they’re both ready to fight.

Are you?

“We're going to do everything that we can to get on the top of college football … and just as I told the team last night: Don't think it can't be you,” he said. “If you can't envision yourself winning a national championship, it will never happen. And I do believe that.

“And from some of you from the outside world — I’ll catch grief (for that). But I don't care. I've been a winner and I've been a part of a winner my whole life. And I don't plan to stop now.”