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?

If I can digress for a moment, I’ll point out that Canzano isn’t a deeply sourced news breaker, so his speculation should be taken for what it’s worth — as that of a guy who has some contacts with coaches and agents who engages in the mutually beneficial act of keeping the rumor mill churning. When he puts these tidbits out, he gets revenue from subscribers who see him as a knower of stuff²; the agents who feed him the info, meanwhile, get their clients’ names associated with jobs. It’s a win-win for those parties, but it also means you should take that kind of “reporting” with a grain of salt, given that the information is almost certainly not coming from WSU.

I’d be ecstatic for Kelly. He would get us back to the offense-forward style of play that has always been the best fit for Pullman, he has immediate cache with both assistants and players, he’s a brilliant coach, and given his history and age (62), I doubt he’s taking this job with an eye toward turning it into something else for his career down the road. If he’s here, it’s because he wants to be. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t make much of his departure from UCLA to go be the offensive coordinator at Ohio State; he spent six years dealing with that tire fire of an athletic department/booster base in Westwood, which would exhaust anyone and isn’t really comparable to the challenges he’d be facing here.

I’d also feel great about Smith. I don’t know enough about MSU to know exactly what went down there beyond just the losing, but he turned around Oregon State from the Gary Andersen disaster and, again, he’s an offensive coach – he was highly thought of when he ran Chris Petersen’s offense at UW. Plus, hiring Smith would have the added bonus of supercharging a rivalry with the Beavers, which would be very fun! And I like fun.

(Both of these guys, by the way, are getting huge payouts from their former employers to not coach, which are subject to offsets – which means that WSU would very likely not have to pay them what they might otherwise command at another school.)

Neuheisel is a lot trickier. The fact that he’s been out so long would normally be disqualifying, but his son, Jerry – most recently the interim offensive coordinator at UCLA – would come as part of the package in what we would presume is a Dick/Tony Bennett kind of arrangement. Jerry seems to be thought of as a bright offensive mind, but I’m honestly not sure where that comes from – he had never been a coordinator until DeShaun Foster got fired, having coached wide receivers and/or tight ends since 2021, and his half season of calling plays for the Bruins doesn’t suggest anything so special that you have to take a flyer on his dad, who hasn’t coached since Paul Wulff was on the sidelines for WSI. 

Perhaps the larger complicating factor is Neuheisel’s time at Washington. I could care less that he coached Washington, specifically — I’m more concerned with his shaky history with what we might call “discipline” or “integrity” while the coach there. Many years ago, the Seattle Times did an incredible piece of multi-part investigative journalism called “Victory and Ruins” that centered, in part, on Neuheisel’s tenure at Washington. It detailed a whole host of transgressions by his players that he either enabled or covered up which infamously included a rape investigation of Jerramy Stevens that ultimately resulted in no punishment for the star tight end.³ Neuheisel also had NCAA infractions. That’s a pretty large preponderance of evidence against his ability to run a program that doesn’t harm folks.

An individual could twist themselves into a pretzel and squint real hard and try to explain all of those issues away — it was a long time ago, attitudes toward sexual assault have changed and he’d do it different now, nobody cares about NCAA stuff anymore, etc. etc. — but I really, really don’t want to have to hold my nose to root for my team’s success, and that’s exactly what I’d have to do with him as our coach, regardless of how talented his son might be.

They range from FCS head coaches (Montana State’s Brent Vigen, again) to young assistants with northwest ties (Missouri offensive coordinator Kirby Moore) to career assistants with WSU ties (Texas defensive coordinator Johnny Nansen and Arizona State defensive coordinator Brian Ward) to at least one completely unqualified person with WSU ties (former quarterback Luke Falk). There are certainly others we don’t know about.

I won’t even dignify Falk’s self-declared “candidacy” with substantive analysis other than to say that considering a former QB with one year of experience coaching QBs at Division II (three years ago!) would make WSU the most unserious program in the country. I understand why some fans are pining for a Coug to take the helm — really, I do — but that initial sugar high would wear off and we’d be full of regret so fast like the day after Halloween.

Outside of the retreads, I think Vigen is far and away the strongest candidate. I wrote this a year ago:

There are fuzzy reports out there about his candidacy last year, up to and including him being Anne McCoy’s preferred choice before she moved on to Jimmy Rogers when Vigen wanted to finish Montana State’s FCS playoff run. There also are reports that he was Oregon State’s preferred candidate this year, but again, he wanted to finish the MSU playoff run so they moved on to JaMarcus Shephard. If that is his stance, I think that’s fine. I initially wanted WSU to move at warp speed to replace Rogers, but if it’s Vigen, I can be talked into waiting for a guy who seems to want to move up, but only on his terms. The anti-Rogers, if you will.

As far as Nansen and Ward (or someone like them), I can be talked into it. Nansen, of course, was a member of the Palouse Posse from American Samoa, has been all over the country, and is most noted for his ability to recruit — particularly Polynesian players. Ward was on Jake Dickert’s staff for a year before taking a job with Kenny Dillingham; his biggest claim to fame at WSU was developing Daiyan Henley at Nevada and then bringing him to Pullman.

Both, of course, are defensive guys. We’d at least need them to promise to avoid Rogers’ dogmatic approach to the defense/offense dynamic, similar to — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — how Dickert has approached offense. 

Then there’s someone like Moore. For alllllll the reasons laid out above, I’m not entirely enamored with the idea of a young coordinator. I have no doubt that a young coordinator could do a great job here, particularly one with the pedigree he has, having coached in various offensive capacities under Jeff Tedford, Kalen DeBoer and Eli Drinkwicz. I also have no doubt that a 35-year-old who shows up and does great in a challenging situation could be gone again in 11 months — the coaching carousel is not getting any less insane. Depending on how hard you want to Zapruder analyze this video from Spokesman-Review reporter Greg Woods, Moore might even be in Pullman now. If he’s the pick, I can get behind it.

I’ll just always be leery. But maybe that’s just the new reality I have to get used to.