John Blanchette: Gamble on Wulff feels right

PULLMAN – This is multiple choice. We’ll start with the answers:

A) Dennis Erickson

B) Mike Price

C) Jim Walden

D) Bill Doba

Now here’s the question: Who was the risky hire to be head football coach at Washington State?

Let’s see – two had never been collegiate head coaches, one was a .500 coach at a lower level of football and the other was baring his itchy feet by being available after 13-month stay at another school.

Maybe you’d like to use one of your lifelines.

Or perhaps you’d like to acknowledge finally that any risk the Cougars are taking in latching onto Paul Wulff and his one-school resumé is no greater than any they’ve embarked upon in their last 50 years of hiring football coaches – because that’s what happens at Washington State.

It seemed a shame on the day of Wulff’s ordination to spend so much energy on the doubts rather than on a devoted soldier getting something he deserves, but such is the current culture of athletics in which not only does everybody have opinions but they’re also instant, widely broadcast, loud and uncompromising.

But then, even WSU athletic director Jim Sterk admitted it.

“Going in,” Sterk said of Wulff, “he was the dark horse.”

A divided public was not always so generous in its assessment, which pushed one former Coug to the breaking point Tuesday. He actually dialed up a call-in radio show.

“I couldn’t stand it,” Doug Wellsandt said. “I had to tell them, ‘You guys don’t understand what you have here.’ “

Of course, the dark horse in this race was Wellsandt’s ride all along. They arrived at Washington State the same year, in 1985, and played alongside each other for four seasons. They have remained close for 22 years and Wellsandt has seen up close or learned of the crucibles that have helped define Paul Wulff. Two were unspeakable tragedies – the disappearance of his mother when he was 12 for which his father was suspected but never implicated, and the loss of his first wife, Tammy, to brain cancer in 2002. But others were just as telling.

Late in the 1989 season, he had to undergo an appendectomy. He missed one game and was back to start at center in the Apple Cup.

“All the things he’s been through – playing, family, whatever – have shaped him to not ever give up,” Wellsandt said, “and that’s what he’ll get across to his players.”

Of course, that’s part of the issue – players, and what kind Wulff can attract to WSU. He did quite well in that regard during his eight seasons as head coach – 15 overall – at Eastern Washington, where he won 53 games and made it to the NCAA’s Division I-AA/FCS playoffs three of the last four years.

But there is not here. This is the Pac-10. That’s the Big Sky, which to some people might as well be Pop Warner.

Surely a BCS-level coordinator would be better equipped to deal with the recruiting challenges faced by a Wazzu, to say nothing of someone with BCS head coaching experience.

Yes, surely. Surely Karl Dorrell and Mike Stoops have been unqualified successes at UCLA and Arizona – oops, Dorrell was just fired. Never mind. Tyrone Willingham. Dirk Koetter. Walt Harris.

There’s a surefire formula, obviously.

“I think if you compare coordinators from I-A programs getting head football jobs and see what their true success rate is after a five-year period,” Wulff said, “you’re going to notice the success rate with coaches with head coach experience is different in a positive way.”

He was speaking of I-AA head coaching experience and rattled off a number of successful examples – among them Ohio State’s Jim Tressel, Georgia Tech’s Paul Johnson, Mississippi’s Houston Nutt and, yes, Erickson and Price. Indeed, Price’s two Rose Bowl teams here earned him considerable support for this opening from people who once reviled him for his Big Sky mediocrity. But most of the prominent examples also had more diversified backgrounds and, yes, there have been flops, too.

One exception: Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer. Not only was all his pre-Hokies coaching done at the sub-BCS level, he also remained employed despite a 24-40-2 record his first six years. Fourteen straight bowl appearances followed.

“I think any coach you hire is a gamble,” Sterk said. “A coordinator is more of a gamble. They’ve never run a program before.”

What makes Wulff less of a gamble are the values that have been his hallmark at EWU and his Cougars core, which if not immediately apparent to Sterk (“I really didn’t know him”) soon became so.

Yes, it is vital that Wulff not minimize the gap between talent available to him in his former position and necessary for this one, and that he assemble a staff which can become competitive in that meat market quickly. He is bringing five Eastern assistants with him – which will probably have the doubters just as nervous as they are about Wulff.

“I have to get used to having a secretary, too,” he joked.

But there is something about this hire that feels right.

“He’s what this program was built on,” said Wellsandt. “Those underdog guys who overachieve.”

As for the risk, well, maybe it only matters that Paul Wulff doesn’t feel like one.