Who should be WSU's next coach?

I never find much use in getting involved in detailed speculation about who might get hired for a major coaching job at WSU because the final product so often ends up being someone who wasn’t even on any of our radars at the jump.

So, with that out of the way … let’s speculate!!!

Mostly I want to think about what kind of coach WSU ought to be targeting. I’ve always found that to much more useful and instructive in terms of the likelihood of success for the coach.

Although you rarely want to exclude anyone¹ from the pool of candidates from the outset, at this point I think hiring for stability has to be part of the equation. That’s not something I would normally say; normally, I’d say just get the best person for the job and deal with the fallout later. This is the same logic I typically apply to one-year players. Is Ace Glass going to leave WSU at the end of this year? Almost certainly! Will I have enjoyed watching him play for that one year, and will he have helped us win games? Also yes. That’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

But these are not “normal” times for the football program, given the fact that we are going to have our third coach in three years. And given that football is sort of fundamentally different than all the other sports when it comes to recruitment and development, I don’t think WSU can afford to go for another up and comer who shows up full of energy, pulls off six wins – because, apparently, that’s all it takes? – and then bails again, making this even more of an existential crisis than it already is.

If I was advising WSU, I’d recommend that they target what we might call “distressed assets” – established head coaches who are down on their luck and looking for a rebound – who ALSO … and this is absolutely key … come in with an offensive mindset. That’s no guarantee that they won’t bail after a year, but I think that sort of coach makes it more likely they build something up for a few years and do so with a style that has been WSU’s bread and butter for pretty much half a century.

John Canzano — a radio/podcast host and newsletter writer who covers (mostly) college sports the northwest — floated some interesting names who would meet those qualifications, including Chip Kelly, Jonathan Smith, and Rick Neuheisel, saying all of them have some level of interest. Kelly is recently fired from the Las Vegas Raiders, Smith is recently fired from Michigan State, and Neuheisel has been a TV talking head for 15 years after being fired from UCLA in 2011. 

How seriously should those names be taken?