Look again
BERKELEY, Calif. - Early in the fourth quarter of its game at California here Saturday night, Washington State did something mortal man wasn’t thought capable of:
Alex Brink threw three passes from the Cougars’ 4-yard line, none of which had much of a shot at anything good. In so doing, WSU ran 11 seconds off the clock. Three plays, 11 seconds elapsed. Ball control, it wasn’t.
It was a mere footnote in WSU’s 20-17 loss to the Bears. But, one week into November of a tepid season, something else has happened to WSU that might be more unlikely.
Since an awful 53-7 loss at Oregon three weeks ago, the Cougars (3-6) have looked increasingly like a real football team. Against Cal, the Cougars allowed endless scoring marches of 17 and 20 plays, yet lived to hang in there.
Two quarters later, Cal’s Justin Forsett appeared ready to score a clinching touchdown but was stoned at the 2-yard line by A’i Ahmu, and the next play, Forsett fumbled to keep WSU in it.
It’s not going to be a season to remember for WSU, but if it happens to be Bill Doba’s last, they haven’t quit playing hard for him.
Games like this, albeit losers, have to help Doba, because pragmatically speaking, when WSU goes to assess him at season’s end, it can’t dwell on his inadequacies of the past four years - it has to guess what might be ahead, this year and next and the year after.
The school is bound to pay Doba about $1.4 million if it fires him, and it will owe his assistants about that much. Since this is Bohler Gym, not Trump Tower, WSU may be forced more into an assessment of what it has going forward than focusing on what factors have recently dragged the program down.
The Times learned this week that the payout due the assistant coaches accrues from contracts of three years apiece, rather than two, as popularly thought. The assistants, all of them, are thus in the middle of three-year deals, security thought to be unmatched across the country.
In a midweek conversation, Doba acknowledged that, saying, “They were the lowest-paid in the Pac-10. I couldn’t offer them money, but I could offer them stability.”
The idea was, recruits often become attached to the assistant coaches seeking them. In recruiting, the Cougars tried as much as they could to drop the word that those assistants were in it for the long haul.
Maybe that worked on somebody. But the biggest single shortfall of the Doba regime has been the inability to identify and retain prospects. Only 30 remain from his 2003-05 classes.
“How do you know?” Doba asked rhetorically, referring to the inexact nature of recruiting.
One kid’s family impressed Doba enough to think he figured to help the Cougars. Today: “He was just a bad guy,” Doba said.
Another had shown a work ethic WSU took to be a predictor. Instead, he majored in late-night video games and drinking.
Hindsight is omniscient, of course. But here’s the answer: Turn over more rocks. There’s usually somebody out there who can shed light where none seems to exist.
While the program has suffered numerous academic casualties, there’s another side of it. Doba says WSU has stiffened academic standards in recent years, not making exceptions to the rule that two consecutive sub-2.0 semesters gets you booted from school.
Ken Casavant, WSU’s faculty athletic representative, says the football program had a 2.65 GPA in the spring semester. That would put it higher than Doba predecessor Mike Price ever could boast.
The question isn’t whether WSU has any young talent about to emerge, it’s an issue of how much. Doba likes young players like corner Chima Nwachukwu, Hallston Higgins, Jeshua Anderson, Daniel Blackledge, Andrew Roxas, B.J. Guerra and Kevin Freitag. He says freshman quarterback Marshall Lobbestael of Oak Harbor has a “a really quick delivery, like Jason Gesser, good feet and good enough mobility.”
With six minutes-plus left here, WSU stood at the Cal 12, down by seven points. It had a very real chance to upend a team that was a 14 ½-point favorite. You can debate whether, on fourth-and-seven, the Cougars should have opted for a field goal to cut the deficit to 13-9, but its defense had played well enough in the second half to believe it would get the ball back, needing only a touchdown to shock the Bears.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way; Cal scored to ice it. But, if you were with the Cougars at Wisconsin, if you were with them at USC, you know that even a debate over a coach’s choice in the last six minutes represents progress.
Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com