John Blanchette: Fair or not, it’s critical season for Doba

The trusty sidekick of sports is an unnatural preoccupation with the premature.

Everything must be known or decided in advance of it occurring. The actual happening of something becomes secondary to some verbal winnowing of what’s going to happen, what has to happen, what if it happens.

Which is why Bill Doba winds up answering questions about his job security in August.

There is little point to the exercise, except maybe as practice for any dreaded contingencies in October and November. Sort of like working on the hook-and-ladder during the first of two-a-days.

But Washington State’s unsightly football swoon of last November weighs heavily on the hearts and minds of the Cougar constituency, which tends to forget that such a thing used to come standard almost every season. The slippage of the Cougars from the champions and contenders they were just after the millennium turn to mere competitors has not played well out there, and Bill Doba is the guy who gets to answer for it.

His reaction:

“You can’t coach not to get fired,” he shrugged.

Well, yes and no. Coaching to win amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?

But his point is more that decisions shouldn’t be made nor strategies concocted out of fear or doubt. This remains the singular lesson of the 2005 season, which in its way was far more perplexing than whatever the Cougars endured a year ago.

And he dismisses the notion that there is any extra pressure on him this year, although there isn’t a coach on shaky ground who hasn’t mouthed the same disclaimer.

“I know there are always rumors going around and such,” he said. “There’s always pressure to win and we want to win, too.”

But there is no getting around it. This season certainly shapes up to be a referendum on Doba’s future, although athletic director Jim Sterk would be quick to remind one and all that this isn’t a democracy and that he doesn’t have an itchy trigger finger.

“People need to know that among coaches who’ve been here more than two years, he’s the most successful (in his first four years) than anyone since Babe Hollingbery,” Sterk said, “and prior to that he was involved in some successful years getting us back into the bowl picture.

“The fact is, we have somebody who’s very good.”

Sterk’s math isn’t quite correct – Jim Sutherland (22-17-1) had a better percentage over those initial four seasons than Doba (25-22). But his point is valid that Doba’s bottom line, to this juncture, is comparable to or better than those attached to the men who have stood for stability in the program over the last 50 years – Sutherland, Jim Walden (21-22-2) and Mike Price (22-23). And none of those men came up winners in Year 5, either.

That accounting exercise leads to the ever-bigger question: Is the identity of Cougar football really all that different now than it was under those coaches?

Should it be?

This isn’t a matter of ambition. If Wazzu isn’t going to aim for the stars, there’s hardly a point in playing. As Sterk said, “My kids and (offensive coordinator Mike) Levenseller’s kids are wondering when we’re going on a bowl trip again.”

But has the landscape changed so dramatically that the bumps and spikes that have marked Cougar football for six decades are no longer realistic or reasonable? In retrospect, is there someone out there upset that the school stuck with Price through his ups and downs, or that the school didn’t get its money’s worth from Walden?

Yes, it is true that the playing field has leveled somewhat. The scholarship drawdown that began in the late 1970s has had its intended impact (and more – surely nobody in the upper crust much desired to see the Boise States and Rutgers of the world crash their party). But many of the obstacles – money, remoteness, drawing power – to sustainable success at WSU remain. Doba is the only Pac-10 coach making less than $1 million this year, and his staff probably fares worse by comparison. The operating budget, without scholarships and salaries, is a shade over what’s on Tyrone Willingham’s W-2.

Can you fire-at-will for mediocre performance the way they have recently at Arizona State and even Stanford if you’re not willing to invest at the same rate?

That will be Sterk’s dilemma if WSU does not play into December, since it only takes mediocrity to reach a bowl. For the Cougar masses, it will not be a dilemma at all – it will be desperation. For as Sterk is all too aware, those three 10-win seasons from 2001-2003 remain both the best thing and possibly the worst to happen to Cougar football in its history, skewing perspectives as they did.

Of course, there was no one on the coaching staffs then, including Doba, who suggested at the time that success couldn’t be continued.

“Our goal in every sport at Washington State is to make the postseason every year,” Sterk said. “If we don’t, then we’re not achieving the kind of success we want.”

And what do you know? We’ll just have to wait a while to see if that happens.