The Monday After: Good riddance, Jake

I have a pretty low bar for behavior when it comes to head coaches at WSU.

Just don’t lie to me.

That’s it. Don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me that Pullman is your home, that loyalty is what matters most, that you want to see things through, that you want to coach for 10 years and then focus on your family, and that this is the perfect place to do it.

This remarkably modest standard is doubly true when the coach sells himself as a Man Of Integrity,¹ and triply true when the university and its alumni have been in a constant state of abandonment for the past two years.

I don’t think it’s that hard, actually, to not lie. But not everyone agrees. Jacob Thorpe — who I consider a friend! — would like you to believe that this is simply the cost of doing business in college football, heavily implying that it actually is we who are in the wrong for being naive enough to believe a coach when he says the sorts of things Jake Dickert said.

Never mind Dickert’s platitudes about WSU over the past few years; I’m talking about the stuff he said right up until the moment he left. In the final days of his tenure, he loudly and publicly lectured his players about loyalty. Then — when a private jet was already in the air from Las Vegas to pick him up in Pullman and fly him to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the next morning — he stood in front of a camera after practice and told everyone how busy he was, being about the business of WSU football. (The video was deleted by the university just hours later.)

How long Dickert was desperately working behind the scenes to find an escape hatch for himself isn’t exactly clear, but there are indications that this had been in the works for weeks. Or, put another way: Right about the same time Dickert’s team collapsed down the stretch for the second consecutive season. Maybe it’s coincidental that the team also collapsed last season about the time his name was being floated in connection with Michigan State. Or maybe it’s not.

At any rate, some of the vitriol of this week might have been mitigated if he’d simply posted a statement of thanks to the university that gift-wrapped his first head coaching job and accelerated his career by about a decade. He eventually did, but not before (A) posting a selfie of himself on the private jet as it sat on a runway in Pullman, and (B) gaslighting us all into thinking this all is actually WSU’s fault by shitting on the school’s resources for an inordinate amount of time during his introductory news conference.

And folks want to try and hand-wave the anger from the fans that Dickert himself courted so fervently?

The thing is, we don’t even have to deal in the theoretical to know that the reaction to Dickert’s departure is really just uniquely about Dickert, given the reactions after Mike Leach and Kyle Smith each moved on. Neither of those two made grand promises about the future, choosing instead to focus on the job at hand; weirdly, the lack of lying never impacted their ability to be great at their jobs. When Leach and Smith each left after their highly successful tenures — certainly more successful than Dickert’s middling 23-20 record — fans were bummed, not viscerally angry.²

Sometimes, it’s really just this simple: A man presents himself as one thing, turns out to very obviously not be that, and being lied to makes people pretty upset!

I think what got to me the most was that the guy whose job it is to prepare his players for challenges ran as fast as he possibly could from this one. At WSU, Dickert was gainfully employed, in no danger of losing his job any time soon, and handsomely paid $2.5 million a year for it. If Dickert is as good of a coach as he wants everyone to believe he is, there was no pressing reason to leave for what is widely recognized as one of the worst P4 jobs in the country. Successfully see WSU through to the other side of this conference purgatory, and he’ll have better opportunities waiting for him. And, if not, he’s still the coach at WSU — director of athletics Anne McCoy approached Dickert about a contract extension during the season.³

Thing is, between the collapses of the past two seasons, we have a fair amount of evidence that Dickert is not the coach that he wants everyone to believe. And maybe he knows it himself, deep down in his cold, cowardly heart. Smooth-talking grifters need to take whatever they can to keep the gravy train rolling for as long as they can, and in that respect, there’s a non-zero chance that he considers Wake Forest the best landing spot possible. Dickert will get every bit of leash imaginable at Wake … and then some. He can go right on winning news conferences while losing half his games on the field for at least a decade before that administration will ever even contemplate a move. Did you know the guy he is replacing is retiring after 11 seasons with a 67-69 record and back to back 4-8 seasons … and the AD tried to talk him out of quitting?

I never imagined Dickert to be the kind of person to whom that kind of cushy, low-expectation job would be attractive, but it seems like there was a lot about Dickert we didn’t know. Take, for example, this comment on Instagram from Kyle Williams:

Or these tweets from a couple of former players:

That’s not sour grapes from guys who didn’t get enough playing time. They have no axe to grind. They’re just pulling back the curtain the rest of the way.

I’m sure there are those who would accuse me of engaging in some level of sour grapes with all this, given that I advocated for keeping Dickert, just a couple of weeks ago, even with three straight losses as a double-digit favorite to close the season. But since I’m able to walk and chew gum at the same time, I can both find Dickert’s behavior infuriating while also being pragmatic about what it means to change coaches right now, facing what WSU is facing — an incredibly challenging schedule in 2025 (thanks to travel), budget cuts, and entrance into a new Pac-whatever that isn’t even fully formed yet.

That’s a lot to put on the plate of someone new. But maybe it’s for the best to just rip the Band-Aid off now — especially with Wake Forest paying whatever Dickert’s buyout is instead of WSU maybe being the one to pay him not to coach in a few years. The new guy can treat it like year zero and build momentum heading into the new conference.

Who will the new guy be? I think it’s important that whoever we hire has head coaching experience; what we’re walking into is not the sort of situation where I want a guy learning on the job, because we need to hit the ground running in 2026. Since our reality is such that we’re not going to be hiring away a sitting coach from the Power 4 (not that we ever were able to do that), I prefer Montana State’s Brent Vigen, who checks all my boxes. He’s just about 50 years old, is offensive minded, has experience building a program, and is deeply connected in the Wyoming/NDSU Craig Bohl coaching tree. You could do a lot worse than the guy who recruited Carson Wentz and Josh Allen.

McCoy seems to have gotten it right with her men’s basketball hire; she’ll now be put to the ultimate test of getting a football hire right, too. And while some folks are getting itchy for an announcement, she should take as long as she needs to in order to get the right person — even as it feels like half the team is escaping through the portal.

I’m reminded of men’s basketball on this front: When every player but one left after the NCAA tournament last season, it felt like everything that Smith had built was gone, just like that. As it turns out, David Riley has an eye for talent and can really coach. Players don’t just go out — they come in, too. And sometimes they’re just as good, or even better, than the guys who leave.

Whoever McCoy hires also will add a bunch of guys and build a team that hopefully can take the field next fall without missing a beat. Maybe that means retaining some guys who are currently exploring their options, or maybe it means adding a bunch of guys you’ve never heard of. Either way, there will be a football team at Washington State University next fall, and it will play games.

And I’ll be watching, just like always. Because unlike Jake Dickert, I’m a Coug.

1  No, I’m not over Tony Bennett leaving, 16 years later. Why do you ask??

2  Or, alternately: We’re all just jealous of Jake’s success, according to WSU’s strength coach.

3  He told her they’d discuss it after the season. Anyone with knowledge of that offer should have known that Dickert was G O N E gone.