John Blanchette: Wayne Tinkle, Ernie Kent mold surprises in Pac-12

At the final media timeout last Sunday, the Oregon State Beavers – a not-quite-unanimous choice a couple of months ago as the most hopeless team in the Pac-12 – trailed seventh-ranked Arizona by a point. Wayne Tinkle gathered his audience and discovered that the words coming out of his mouth were not his own.

“I stole a line from Dan Fitzgerald,” Tinkle admitted.

It was just a fragment from one of the never-ending supply of stories spun by the late Gonzaga coach, whose influence has left its mark on more coaches than just one proud alum of Ferris High School.

“Guys, I’m super proud of you,” Tinkle told his players. “I’m thrilled you got us in this position with under 4 minutes to go.

“Now, is that what you want to hear from me?”

The chorus of “Hell, no” in reply was enough to convince Tinkle the Beavers weren’t going to mail in the ending – which they proved in closing out the Wildcats 58-56.

A day earlier in Seattle, Washington State won a second straight conference road game for the first time in six years. Before the season, you could have found better odds on Ernie Kent buying suits off the rack at Value Village.

Now the Oregon schools make their way through Washington – the Cougs get the Ducks tonight, the Beavers on Saturday. And contrary to the snap judgments that are the red corpuscles of sports nowadays, the games actually matter.

“As you start to move along and have some success,” Kent said Wednesday, “you can kind of calculate, ‘If we can do this and that and have some success here or there’ – and that’s kind of fun to do.”

Fun. Who’d have thought?

It could even be suggested that the Cougs and Beavs – both with new coaches, both cynically written off – are the best stories going in the Pac-12 at the moment.

Though, yes, it’s an early moment.

In Wazzu’s case, the hothouse blossoming of forward Josh Hawkinson has been the lookie-here development in an 8-7 start that was fitful before it got fun. But every bit as remarkable has been Kent inheriting a ship of lost basketball souls – in particularly underperforming types like Jordan Railey and Que Johnson – and goosing some production from them.

This was a 21-loss team a year ago. Hawkinson watched that season as a redshirt, so point guard Ny Redding is the only true new face in the rotation.

Fact is, Kent’s best work has been in rebuilding psyches.

“It’s as much as we’ve done in any other program,” he acknowledged. “It’s as much parenting as it is coaching.

“The thing is, this team – for whatever reason – responded more openly and willingly to change and be helped and be led than any time I’ve coached before. Which is amazing in itself, with young people in this day and age, to allow you to lead them.”

Yet he defers to Oregon State as the Pac-12’s biggest surprise – and at 11-4, surprise may not cover it. After all, the Beavers lost 84 percent of their scoring from 2014, and promptly lost an exhibition game to Western Oregon. Defections, graduation and a heart problem that sidelined guard Chai Baker left Tinkle with eight scholarship players – so after deciding not to invest in clearance-bin summer transfers, the coach held walk-on tryouts so the Beavers could practice.

“To the scholarship players’ credit,” Tinkle said, “they could have seen us add seven walk-ons and said, ‘This year’s going to be a joke.’ But they welcomed those guys and respect them – and a couple have played some quality minutes.

“And our staff – we’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘Don’t worry about this year – it’s a throwaway. You didn’t have a chance to recruit.’ That would have been the easy way to go about it, but that’s not the message we needed to send. We needed to earn our paychecks.”

The sidebar to all this has been the coaches themselves – whose hires were met with more than a little skepticism.

Kent’s was given the “Another retread?” treatment – one national know-it-all being especially loud that he was simply The Wrong Guy. OSU, meanwhile, plucked Tinkle from Montana – and for all his success there, that is the Big Sky Conference. The only thing that saved the athletic director was that he was hiring him to Corvallis instead of Pullman, where the mere words Big Sky are toxic, thanks to a couple of recent whiffs.

“It’s nice to see Bob DeCarolis didn’t get caught up in a big name, or a sexy name from a big program,” Tinkle said. “I hope we can show ADs down the road that just because you’re a Division II coach, or a low-to-mid Division I, that doesn’t mean success won’t translate.”

That will require further achievement, of course. Heck, the Cougs and Beavs aren’t even to the under-four timeout yet.