What recently was thought to be a weightless season-ending game between two rivals with nothing at stake could be a referendum on the future of Cougars coach Paul Wulff.
It’s a little bit crazy, this notion of a three-year project condensed into a three-hour examination of Wulff’s struggle to put a competitive squad on the field, while making tangible progress off of it. One game? Can a judgment on Wulff, whose embattled career on the Palouse has reached a crossroads, really be rendered by one game?
Sure it can. If the Cougars take down the Huskies, who are bringing their own hyper-motivated agenda into Martin Stadium – their first bowl berth since 2002 is on the line – Moos will be pressed to grant Wulff at least one more year.
Put yourself in Moos’ position: You’re the athletic director of a school whose football team has won for just the sixth time in three seasons – a once hapless, helpless team that surrendered 65 points in its opener – and now you’re going to fire him after he winds up the 2010 schedule on a two-game winning streak?
I know, there are rumors that Moos’ former colleague at Oregon, Mike Bellotti, is eager to return to the sidelines. Bellotti’s availability is intriguing – he’s recognized, and has a Rose Bowl trip on his résumé – but he’s not an ideal fit for Pullman, nor is Pullman an ideal fit for him.
Pullman is an ideal fit for the three, maybe four human beings on this earth capable of coaching a major-college football team, and Wulff, a former Cougars player whose prevailing aspiration is to remain a Cougar, happens to be one of them.
There’s a lot to like about Wulff’s work. In 2008, he took over a barnyard mess of a football program, infiltrated by unscholarly athletes who combined an indifference to classwork with a cavalier disregard for the law. A failure to meet academic standards found the NCAA stripping the WSU of eight scholarships, but even more disturbing were the 25 arrests of Cougars players between January of 2007 and May of 2008.
Four of those arrests involved felonies, and eight of the arrests resulted in at least one day spent in jail.
That’s what Wulff inherited three years ago. Since then, he has motivated his players to the point they’ve stepped up in the classroom – the team’s collective 2.72 grade-point average last season was its highest in 30 years – with an emphasis of devoting more time in the weight room than in the courtroom.
If Bellotti somehow is persuaded to his revive his coaching career in Pullman, does he sustain Wulff’s commitment to producing solid citizens?
On the other hand – and it’s a hand the size of Godzilla’s paw – there’s Wulff’s record at WSU: It began with 2-11, with the only victories over Portland State, representing the NCAA’s playoff subdivision, and the Huskies, representing Tyrone Willingham’s final phone-in season.
In 2009, the Cougars went 1-11, with the lone W over SMU, and this season, they’re 2-9, having beaten Montana State early and Oregon State late. Of Wulff’s five victories as Cougars coach, he has achieved precisely one – against the Beavers, three weeks ago – in regulation time, over a major-college opponent.
And yet, just when the sheer awfulness seemed to threaten Wulff’s job status at midseason, WSU rallied behind its embattled coach. The Cougars gave themselves a chance to win at UCLA, refused to be mulched by Oregon’s relentless ground machine until the fourth quarter, managed to keep an expected debacle at Stanford within 10 points, held their own in what was supposed to be a physical mismatch against California, and then beat Oregon State.
By 17 points. On the road.
While WSU’s plodding trek to the fringe of respectability has gone unnoticed nationally – a report on ESPN.com had Wulff all but fired the other day – it’s gotten the attention of recruits. The Cougars have scored 19 oral “commitments” for 2011, including Gonzaga Prep’s Bishop Sankey, regarded among the top running-back prospects on the West Coast. No scholarship is official until it’s sealed in ink, of course, but 19 oral commitments is 16 more than WSU got after Bill Doba’s last team finished 5-7 in 2007.
Again, back into the mind of Bill Moos: Do you really want to threaten the possibility of another strong recruiting class for the Cougars, the second in two years, by blowing up a rebuilding project and starting over?
Preventing the Huskies from advancing to a bowl game figures to be an ulterior objective for WSU on Saturday. It’s a tantalizing side dish, knowing that an upset can prevent an intrastate rival from enjoying the festivities of a bowl game.
But the Cougars’ more urgent task is to take care of business on the field, so that Paul Wulff can keep his job on the sideline.
john.mcgrath@thenewstribune.com
