Firings Prove The Heat Is On In Pullman

I f you didn’t like the substance, you’re not going to like the stats.

Because as depressingly unforgettable as the 1999-2000 athletic year was at Washington State University, the cold math looks even worse.

You want it straight? WSU’s overall won-lost record - games, matches, dual meets, varsity-8 races, medal play - for the recently concluded school year was 104-161. Not Clipperesque, but borderline burlesque.

In sports in which the Pacific-10 Conference keeps standings, the Cougars were - gulp - 18-85. Now that’s Clipperesque. Slice it a different way, and against all Pac-10 opponents - head-tohead, in tournaments, conference meets, dark alleys - WSU was 54-222.

And against the hated Huskies? Yikes - 9-37.

The literal bottom line: WSU finished last in the Pac-10 in every varsity men’s sport the school offers - every one - though it did place third in indoor track, which competes in the Pac-10/Big West hybrid called the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. The Cougars women won the MPSF; in only two other sports, outdoor track and rowing, did they finish in the first division.

Now for the most unsettling stat of all: three coaches fired in the past 14 months.

A bitter fact of coaching life? Sure. Had to be done? No argument here.

But it is still a grim departure at Wazzu, which used to be one of those rare havens where perspective reigned and head coaches just didn’t get whacked.

In the last 39 years, for instance, the Cougars have had back-to-back winning football seasons just twice. Yet you have to go back to Bert Clark in 1967 to find a football coach who was shown the door. Clark mostly didn’t win enough, to be sure, but he also suggested publicly and loudly that WSU shouldn’t be in the old Pac-8. His bosses concluded instead that it was Bert who shouldn’t be in it.

Len Stevens, the good-guy basketball coach, put winners on the court for five straight seasons at Nevada and was canned. At WSU, they gave him a year’s grace to find suitable work after none of his four teams topped .500.

Bob Greenwood, still the most misbegotten hire in Cougars history, was fired after a single year coaching basketball in 1972, either out of mercy or to avert a player mutiny, take your pick.

And there was a revolving door for volleyball coaches in the 1970s and ‘80s while the school researched what a side-out was. A couple of those departures probably weren’t voluntary, but they might have been shotgun hirings, too.

But that’s it. Otherwise, we’re talking about the cradle of compassionate conservatism. For Coug’s sake, the school president tried to talk Jim Sweeney out of quitting!

Now Steve Farrington has been - how was it put? - “not renewed” as baseball coach. Last spring, Harold Rhodes and Kevin Eastman were disengaged on consecutive days in the week after basketball season, though Eastman’s adios was announced as a resignation. How he collected a six-figure buyout for quitting is beyond me, though I wrote it off as a gesture of athletic director Rick Dickson’s gratitude for being saved the trauma of an actual decision.

And, hey, nobody minded paying two basketball coaches for one 6-22 season, did they?

Again, each dismissal seemed only prudent, however painful it has been for the principals. If any of them felt shortchanged on opportunity, however, they are simply delusional.

Damn right the job is tough. Did the school try to hide that in the fine print or something?

Still, this ranks as the nastiest new side effect to Wazzu’s fitful passage into, well, into whatever niche it can carve out for itself in the cutthroat world of college athletics.

Dickson’s many critics (even louder now that he, too, is gone) simply chalk it up to his dismal hiring instincts - and, yes, we’re still waiting for an unqualified success. Hiring is undoubtedly the critical factor. But batting 1.000 is rare, and so is batting .000. The same guy who whiffed on Bert Clark hired Marv Harshman and Bobo Brayton. The same guy who championed George Raveling tried Greenwood first. Jim Livengood almost retired undefeated in the hiring division, but when he jetted off to become athletic director at Arizona he took the soccer coach who built WSU’s program with him, so he gets an asterisk.

What rings somewhat hollow is the incessant drone that any hire from within the Cougars “family” automatically will be good for whatever ails. It is conveniently forgotten that no one was more a part of the “family” than Rhodes, whose dismissal went curiously unlamented.

Family is good. Family is not infallible.

And the family had better be able to deal with an ever-changing landscape, and a more demanding fan base than what the Cougars have ever encountered before - including a more strident faction that for some reason believes the school can be consistently good in everything even when it never has been.

Hunger and resourcefulness are the Cougar coach’s best friends now more than ever, even in this age when scholarship limitations have purportedly narrowed the talent gap. Once WSU’s new facility upgrades are completed, it should not be assumed that the Cougs will have to shoo away All-Americans by the carload. All those snazzy barbells in the new weight room have yet to translate into many wins.

Sure, things are looking up - but how far up, and how fast? If the quarterback gets hurt again or a significant hunk of that “Top 25” basketball recruiting class somehow doesn’t register for classes, will Wazzu be a three-times-in-a-row loser?

Besides, things have to be looking up. There is nowhere else to fall.

The fact is, for all those ugly numbers cited earlier, WSU has never been particularly good in golf or swimming or tennis, and only intermittently good in other sports. Salvaging the dismal years was always left to baseball and track, unfailingly good until late.

Not that they don’t have company. You noticed, of course, Oregon State and Washington helping the Cougs bring up the rear in baseball, which speaks to the Northwest disadvantage. And if you were really paying attention, you noticed that Oregon finished seventh to WSU’s ninth in track - and last in women’s track.

Yep. That Oregon. Track capital of the world.

Of course, the Ducks have other toys with which to console themselves. The Cougs, well, they’d better start carving some.