Jimmy Rogers believes in WSU's future. Shouldn't you?

Given everything that’s happened in and around WSU over the past 18 months, a lot of folks have taken to resigning themselves to an extremely pessimistic view of the future of WSU athletics. It’s become a sort of race to the bottom to declare us a better fit for the Big Sky than the Power 4, and the rhetoric really went into overdrive a couple of weeks ago when Jake Dickert ran away from WSU as fast as he could and then decided to repeatedly shit on the school that gift wrapped his first head coaching job from 3,000 miles away.

Waving a white flag about [GESTURES WILDLY AT EVERYTHING] when the fight is just getting started is puzzling to me, but I will admit that even the most optimistic of us have had to fight back bleak thoughts about what all of this might eventually mean for the school we love. It’s a scary time, and I don’t blame anyone who looked at Dickert leaving for one of the worst P4 jobs in the country and wondered: What are we even doing here?

But as I watched new football coach Jimmy Rogers introduce himself to the WSU community last week, I found myself continually coming back to one question:

If the trajectory of WSU athletics really is as bad as so many folks say, would Rogers be our football coach right now?

Usually, that kind of reasoning comes into play when a coach with an unimpeachable pedigree comes to a school — like, for example, how hiring Mike Leach changed the way we thought about what was possible for WSU football. That’s not the case here; we hired an FCS coach (which is always risky), at a salary that’s about a million less than what his predecessor was making (which looks bad). That would cause outsiders to say: Well yes, actually, the trajectory is definitely that bad! 

But that’s not the way I was thinking of that question.

For starters, I don’t see hiring an FCS coach at WSU as inherently bad, nor do I find the salary problematic. WSU has had historical success with I-AA/FCS coaches¹ , and Rogers’ salary ($1.57 million) is pretty run of the mill for someone coming up from FCS. Spending an extra million on the salary just for appearances is stupid, not ambitious; beyond that, I don’t think spending an extra million on a different coach necessarily gets you a million in marginal value for the program. If Rogers is your guy, he’s your guy.

But I digress. Back to the original question, which I ask because I’m not sure it’s possible at this point to believe that Rogers would leave what was a pretty cherry situation at South Dakota State for an obviously sinking ship.

In a statement reminiscent of Leach’s introduction 13 years ago,² Rogers said:

“I'm not unaware of kind of all the critiques of Washington State,” he said. “I also don't care about them. I don't care what people think of me, either. I was entrusted to do a job, and I'm going to do it at the highest level I possibly can.”

Whether you’re buying that probably depends on a couple of things: 1) How much you know about Rogers’ history, and 2) Whether you were able to watch the press conference.

If you weren’t able to do the latter, it’s worth your while. There is an unvarnished authenticity to way he speaks that stands in stark contrast to his predecessor. It will leave you believing that, no, he actually does not care what people think:

As for the former, you probably at least know the broad strokes of Rogers’ career at this point: He spent 18 of the last 19 years at FCS South Dakota State, first playing linebacker, then starting coaching after he was done playing (with a short, 1-year detour to Florida Atlantic as a grad assistant), working his way up from the very bottom to become defensive coordinator, getting promoted to head coach two years ago, and promptly winning a national championship before taking a step back this year by “only” making it to the FCS semifinals.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Rogers was SDSU’s golden boy. He was the hand-picked successor to the school’s most successful coach, John Stiegelmeier, and the first two seasons of his tenure did nothing to dissuade the notion that he was prepared to carry the torch; fans of the team are absolutely crushed that he left.

If Rogers’ goal all along was to climb the coaching ladder such that he could jump to the first viable FBS job before age 40, he sure went about it an extremely weird way.