The Monday After: A remarkable achievement

There’s obviously still (presumably) a very long way to go in order to know if Jimmy Rogers is the real deal as WSU’s head coach. One six-win season does not a legend make. But now that his first regular season is in the books and a bowl game is in our immediate future, I think it’s worthwhile to take a step back and try to contextualize what the team accomplished this year under his direction.

One way to try and contextualize is to compare to previous results, and in light of what WSU has done in the past decade, it’s no longer especially impressive to simply make a bowl game. But we all know that there’s not a lot of utility anymore in comparing the present with the immediate past, and when we dig a little deeper to try and quantify what six wins means in this season, it becomes real hard to not get pretty darn excited about the future under Rogers.

When the Cougars headed off into this two-year journey into the wilderness, it was widely assumed by outsiders that WSU and Oregon State would simply slink off into irrelevance, getting absorbed into the Mountain West, never to be meaningfully heard from again. And if we’re being honest, that was the worst fear of a lot of our fans – myself included. 

But WSU has a long and proud history of being annoyingly relevant, always against long odds. Achieving six wins against this schedule in this environment might actually stand up as one of the great examples of that, and Rogers made it happen in his first season — with so much stacked against him, his staff, and his players.

It’s been well documented how the Mountain West more or less tried to extort WSU and OSU into re-upping their football scheduling agreement for 2025, which resulted in both schools walking away and quickly transitioning into a mad dash to piece together their own slates. Schools usually schedule their handful of non-conference games many years in advance, and while there are occasionally cancellations, schools are rarely looking for more than one game to fill a schedule on a tight time frame. Having to schedule six games on the fly for the next season in a matter of months is unheard of and incredibly difficult, given that other schools are mostly locked in to their nonconference games. That was the task before the Cougs.¹  

The resulting mishmash for 2025 with 12 opponents from 10 different conferences appeared daunting from the start. The quality of teams didn’t appear super intimidating on the whole, but the sequencing (lots of September home games, then just two home games between the Apple Cup on September 21 and the season finale against Oregon State on Saturday) and travel (the Cougars would log more than 16,000 travel miles for their six road games this season) looked like a major challenge.

Then, a plot twist: As it turned out, the quality of the opponents was also very strong!

Everyone knew Mississippi would be good, but they ended up being one of FOUR different opponents – No. 16 Virginia, No. 19 James Madison, and No. 20 North Texas joined No. 7 Mississippi – that finished ranked by the AP and at least shared the best record in their conferences. All four of those games were on the road. San Diego State, meanwhile, spent time in the “others receiving votes” category and also finished tied for first in the MWC.²

When it was all over, ESPN’s FPI³ ranked WSU’s schedule 51st, roughly in the top third of difficulty in the country. Eighteen different “Power 4” teams finished with a lower strength of schedule, including three former Pac-12 opponents (Utah at 57, Arizona at 61, and Cal at 77) and pretty much half the ACC (including Wake Forest at 75). 

SOS, as you might expect, is calculated merely by the FPI ranking of the teams everyone played and where they played them. It doesn’t factor in other things that are harder to quantify but that we intuitively know to be challenging – like, say, weeks of consecutive road trips and overall travel miles resulting from multiple trips to the Eastern time zone. There’s obviously no way to add that to a metric, but I’ll say this: Given that nobody else chooses to put together a schedule like the one the Cougars had foisted upon themselves, I think we can safely say that WSU’s schedule was actually more difficult than that of the folks around them in these rankings. Unlike WSU, they had the benefit of both (mostly) regional conferences and noncons scheduled (and well-placed on the calendar) far in advance of the season.

So, WSU played a hard schedule and came up with six wins. That’s good context! Another perspective would be that there are dozens of teams in FBS who had an easier schedule and finished with fewer wins; this includes Power 4 members Maryland (4), Boston College (2), and North Carolina (4). 

Another lens we can use is FPI’s “strength of record” metric, which essentially marries up a team’s wins with the strength of the opponents they beat (and presumably also the quality of the opponents they lost to). SOR is generally most useful to compare resumes of College Football Playoff contenders in order to distinguish between teams with either (a) the same number of wins or (b) different numbers of wins against different strengths of schedule, but we can use it to our benefit in order to measure how WSU’s six wins against this schedule actually stacks up with other programs. 

SOR confirms what you probably suspected: WSU didn’t just beat up on some bad teams to eke out bowl eligibility, as many non-Power 4 teams often do; in fact, WSU’s six wins were considered more impressive than 20(!) non-Power 4 teams who also had six or more wins. Among those 20? A half dozen teams who whose eight wins didn’t measure up to WSU’s six: Hawaii, Fresno State, Ohio, Western Kentucky, Toledo, and Jacksonville State.⁴

Of course, the schedule wasn’t the only challenge this staff faced.

Rogers inherited a roster decimated by transfers following Jake Dickert’s departure. The portal certainly provides an opportunity to restock quickly, but here’s the thing about what Rogers was trying to do: He was hired on December 28 – a month after the regular season ended – which means the pool of available players had basically already been reduced to players on the fringes or folks who were late to transferring because of coaching changes. 

And I don’t think that even captures the enormity of his challenge: Rogers still had to convince the guys who were as yet uncommitted that they should come play for him at WSU and not go somewhere else! That might not seem like a huge deal, but I’m trying to imagine the recruiting pitch of a first-year FBS coach with very little NIL to offer and no conference affiliation. I’m especially trying to imagine how he pitched it to the guys who were going to be seniors, and thus come to WSU for just one season without any legitimate shot at CFP glory.

It helped that Rogers was able to convince some of his former players at South Dakota State to join him, but that hardly seemed like a slam dunk for success. Besides, it’s not like he brought the whole roster; in addition to the few dozen players who elected to stay at WSU, he still had to add a bunch of guys who were – for lack of a better term – portal leftovers while also adding a bunch of freshmen with the hope that at least some of them could contribute. 

Somehow, Jimmy Rogers and his staff turned all that into a team that won six games against a top 50 schedule – and easily could have won a couple more. He and his coaching staff took those 75(!) new players – including 19(!) new starters – and then absolutely, positively, coached the living hell out of them, producing a team that won two fewer games than last year but finished exactly the same in FPI (65). Had this team played Dickert’s MWC-heavy schedule – which ranked 105th – they probably also would have won eight games … and maybe more.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say I’m excited for the future. If Rogers and his staff were able to identify useful players with one hand tied behind their backs and then coach them up into a viable team – one that finished behind just 10 non-Power 4 schools in FPI – it’s entirely reasonable to believe bigger things are in store when they’re able to properly recruit the calendar, and do so with a conference championship squarely on their radar.

I’m excited to find out.

1  If you want to know how annoying it is to schedule without a conference, even Notre Dame has a scheduling agreement with the ACC to make it easier and more predictable!

2  I suppose we could consider Washington a difficult opponent, too, but the Huskies neither finished in the top 25 nor tied for their conference lead. Sad!

3  There’s nothing particularly special about ESPN’s Football Power Index, but it seems fine and it’s easily accessible.

4  WSU also finished ahead of 17 Power 4 teams in SOR, but all of them had five or fewer wins.