The Monday After: Get bent, Jimmy

Ever since Jimmy Rogers left us high and dry on Friday, I’ve had a hard time expressing my anger in a way that isn’t simply using a four-letter word that starts with “f” repeatedly.

I’m not angry that a coach at my school left for another job. That’s always been part of the deal with college athletics, even if it’s become even more so now. I’m mad at … well, I’m mad at a number of things. I’m really, really mad at Rogers for saying this at his introductory press conference:

This isn’t all that different from how Jake Dickert exited, shortly before that news conference. Jake said one thing after the season ended and then did another a couple of weeks later, which made me hopping mad then, just like I am today.² Nobody forced Rogers to imply an enormous promise to a hurting fanbase on his first day on the job — and the quote makes it clear that he did, in fact, know that we were hurting.

And here he is, stabbing us in the back 11 months later. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised after he bailed on his alma mater just two seasons after being anointed the heir to an FCS empire. As I said when Dickert left, I really am convinced that the biggest-talking coaches are simultaneously the most insecure children and cowards at heart. If these guys are as good as they think they are, they can follow through on what they say, win a ton of games, and then go to a great job when they’ve fulfilled their own words. 

Jimmy – a man who already was making more than $1.5 million to coach in Pullman – stunned his players by saying: “This is an opportunity that I can't pass up. It's life changing for me and my family and something I have to take." 

Oh really? It’s life changing to go to Iowa freaking State? 

I’m not sure how familiar you are with Iowa State’s past, but that football program has an incredible history of irrelevance — it’s one of the handful of programs whose history lags far behind our own. ISU’s only sustained success has come in the last 10 years, and under one coach. And even that mostly involved a series of seven and eight-win seasons. THAT is Jimmy’s “life-changing opportunity”?¹

Oh, but what about the money? Surely that is “life changing?” Actually, Jimmy will be paying his $4 million buyout to WSU out of his ISU salary, meaning he functionally has a 6-year/$14 million contract — a $750,000 raise on what he was making at WSU.

Like, c’mon man. How big of idiots does he think we are?

Pretty big, apparently: He says it was “never my intention” to leave after one year, as if that excuses the lying because — you know — he had no choice in this matter. Like so many other folks in public life, they’ll want you to believe they are the most powerful and toughest people in the world while simultaneously having their hands forced by circumstances outside their control. You can’t have it both ways, and it’s utter gaslighting bullshit.

Literally nobody forced Rogers to do this. He actually could have passed up the chance to walk out of town for a mediocre job and avoided forever being known as a lying sack of shit. But he didn’t, and that’s now his legacy.

I’m also really mad about being back to more or less square one with the team – and even that might be a generous assessment of where the roster ends up in a month. 

From the moment the Pac-12 dissolved, the goal has been to get through these two years in conference purgatory ready to hit the ground running as a top team in the new “Pac-12.” I spent Jimmy’s entire (brief) tenure looking at most everything through that lens, up to and including the final win over Oregon State that secured bowl eligibility, analyzing what that meant for where we were going. Rogers brought a whole bunch of South Dakota State players, most of them seniors, to stabilize and bridge the gap. Mission accomplished — even if I had to watch the boringest football on the planet for three months, convincing myself that it actually was awesome and that I was super grateful for it.

Last week, Rogers inked a strong recruiting class that is hanging out in the rankings where WSU has always typically hung out, even in the beforetimes. Good. Even if the football would probably be dry and painful to watch at times, there was no reason to believe we wouldn’t be in the mix for a conference title in year one, particularly if they could land a competent QB in the portal.

God, I now feel so stupid. That whole goal probably is toast. Presumably, a large swath of the roster will bail, as will the vast majority of the recruiting class. Jimmy will pillage both, inviting the guys he thinks can help him win at his new job, just like he did when he left SDSU (which, by the way, just finished its worst season since 2019). Others who don’t want to follow him (or weren’t invited) will test the transfer waters to see what else is out there. The next coach will, for the second year in a row, have to try and keep the good players around (probably only a few will stay) and then piece the rest of it together without the benefit of an actual recruiting cycle.

And that’s why I think we will very likely end up worse than square one, if “square one” is defined as the day Jimmy was hired. Yes, coaching in 2025 means any new coach will have the benefit of using the portal to restock, but WSU has always been a school that needed to recruit and develop players, and I actually think that’s as true now as ever: When your top players can bail after any very good season, there better be an underlying foundation ready to restock – particularly on the lines, where the portal tends to be very competitive because there just aren’t that many of those guys. 

With our third head coach in three years, we now are looking at the likelihood of two consecutive classes of leftovers. That’s the kind of cracked foundation that can take years for a program like WSU to rebuild from because it can’t simply buy its way to the top. Rather than continuing momentum for a successful “new Pac-12” debut, WSU is very likely in a worse place now than if it had never hired Rogers in the first place.

That’s what left me struggling on Friday to not get really depressed about all of it.

As much as I’ve clowned on Dickert and Rogers for leaving for Wake Forest and Iowa State, the fact that they ran away from Pullman as fast as possible to take objectively lame jobs is assuredly also a reflection of what WSU has to offer at this point. As one person put it to me, it feels like rats off a sinking ship, which is really bleak … and not at all unwarranted, given how many coaches have left other programs, as well.³

Between the dissolution of the Pac-12, this football mess, the horrid records of our basketball programs, the fall from grace of soccer and volleyball, and the struggle of the university at large for enrollment and the resultant budgetary challenges … I mean, fuck. FUCK. It’s incredibly hard not to be incredibly discouraged about literally all of this, and I do think it’s legitimate to wonder if it’s even worth it to try and field high-level athletics programs anymore.

I love my school. I love how athletics can become a physical embodiment of the spirit of the university. And the worst predictions of what relegation would mean for us are starting to look prescient, as the cost of trying to compete in a world where everything is stacked against us will only continue to go up — with questionable returns.

About the only thing keeping me afloat at this point is that WSU truly is a community of people who care about something bigger than the teams, and it’s those folks who keep me coming back to do this, even as I sometimes just want to walk away. At the risk of this turning into something like an advertisement for the Premium Slack, I say the following with complete sincerity: Those 100 or so folks have helped me work through my feelings on this more than they could possibly know, encouraging me to once again look toward the future rather than focusing on how many times I’ve been kicked in the nuts. 

That’s why I keep coming back to this, even when I’m mad at myself for being the mark who believed Jimmy in the first place.

1  Given his seeming surprise and irritation as the year went on with attendance at WSU’s late-season games and the fact that Jimmy agreed to have his buyout at WSU come out of his salary and Iowa State, I’m starting to think maybe Jimmy doesn’t put a whole lot of research or thought into these “life-changing” moves. But I digress.

2  For the crowd who would say, “c’mon Nusser … what else is he supposed to do?”, I retort: Please refer to Mike Leach and Kyle Smith as great examples of how not to overpromise the extent of your tenure before you go. I know those guys spent years here before they left, but at no point did they do more than say variations of, “I really like Pullman and I’m trying to build a winner.” And those guys actually gave us something!

3  Smith, Jen Greeny, Brian Green, Todd Shulenberger … although Shulenberger had probably hit his expiration date, anyway.