The Monday After: Disaster, again

I’m reminded today of the old saying, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me,” because I’m feeling awfully foolish for ever believing that this kind of a finish to this particular WSU season wasn’t really possible.

As a sports fan in general and as a Cougar fan in particular, I should know better than to ever believe that something unfortunate is off the table. We’ve been subjected to so many improbable events over the years that folks came up for a derisive name for it. So, yeah.

But still! It really did seem like the crash-and-burn we witnessed last season would not be in play, if for no other reason than the schedule was sooooo weak and this team so obviously above the talent level of their opponents. Even if they tailed off a bit, I figured they should at least be able to stumble to the finish line — even in spite of themselves — to pick up a couple of wins in the final three.

At the very least, assuming a win over Wyoming at home seemed extremely safe.

And yet!

By any historical measure, we should still be thrilled with this season. I don’t have to tell you that Washington State is a school that hasn’t won eight games very often. We’ll also be heading to a pretty good bowl game — certainly the best one with the most interesting opponent since 2018.

And yet!

Here we are, contemplating just how “good” an 8-4 season — which includes an Apple Cup win over Washington(!!) — actually is. And that’s because there really isn’t any historical precedent for this particular sequence of events against this kind of a schedule, nor any kind of logical reason why the last few weeks should have played out this way. The team started the stretch run with a November bye, then pasted Utah State at home. They were about as healthy as anyone could possibly expect a football team to be, and with a few weeks to go, ESPN’s FPI metric put WSU with over a 50% chance of winning out. To not just not win out but actually lose all three is just mind boggling.

And it’s not like there were mitigating circumstances that predictive metrics were missing; the betting markets installed the Cougars as double-digit favorites in all three games. By any measure, WSU was not just a better team than every team it found a way to lose to during this three game disaster, but a much better team.

That’s not something we could say a year ago, during the six-game losing streak that destroyed another promising season. In trying to explain that one, you could make a reasonable argument that maybe the Cougars were never actually as good as we thought, that Wisconsin actually was down, that winning games in the Pac-12 is tough, etc.

None of that was in play here, which leaves us looking for another common thread. And that inevitably leads us to the guy in charge of it all: Jake Dickert.

It’s certainly some kind of whiplash over the course of two seasons to go from “this is incredible, I hope someone doesn’t hire our young coach away!” to “man this really really sucks” to “WE ARE SO BACK!! PLEASE DON’T TAKE OUR GUY!!!” to “maybe our head coach is actually the problem??” But it’s inescapable that each of these collapses happened under his watch.

That doesn’t mean a change in head coaches is in order. We can simultaneously conclude that he’s not been good enough at all parts of his job and also that firing him would be a pretty dumb move. Beyond the financial implications of a change, as long as we’re stuck in this weird purgatory between iterations of the Pac-12, we need to take stability where we can get it.

But something had to change, and the most obvious move didn’t take long: Defensive coordinator Jeff Schmedding is out as of this morning. After he followed up a bad debut (83rd nationally in scoring defense playing a Pac-12 schedule) with something even worse (90th while playing an MWC schedule), it simply had to be done.

I’d like to suggest, though, that laying all of the defense’s problems at Schmedding’s feet risks making him a scapegoat for larger issues. When your head coach is the former defensive coordinator, you’d not expect the defense to be the weak link for two years. Beyond that, this is now the third time Dickert will be hiring for that job; you’ll remember that his original DC, Brian Ward, left for ASU after just one season in 2022. There are conflicting reports about why that happened, and whether it was a mutual parting of ways or not, but the bottom line is that Dickert has been unable to nail that hire. When Mike Leach struggles to field a competent defense or find a suitable defensive coordinator, it’s not really surprising; when your defensive-minded head coach has the same issues … you can’t help but wonder.

It’s not fair to compare Dickert to Leach. But I think the contrast does show the vagaries of turning your program over to an exceedingly young coach. Not only is he learning on the job, he also took the reins with a fairly limited network of coaching contacts. In time, both of those things will grow, but it’s obviously a bit of a struggle now — and it’s going to be put even more to the test now that he’s going to be replacing both coordinators: offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle is set to take the same position at Oklahoma.

The most concerning thing to me about these past two seasons is that Dickert’s teams haven’t gotten better — either within games or over the course of the season. That reeks of poor coaching, and Dickert is the guy at the top. What is he not doing? I’m certain he’s doing everything he can to figure it out, but also: Not all coaches who do everything they can necessarily figure it out.

I suppose all we really can hope for is that these insanely disappointing finishes to both games and seasons are part of the growing process for an inexperienced head coach. Dickert’s got a massive opportunity to reset some things with these two hires. Let’s hope he gets it right.