Doba stands up to extra pressure
PULLMAN – It has been a tough week for the Washington State football team and its head coach, Bill Doba. Even he’ll admit that. But he does have some experience to fall back upon.
“Well, I think it probably is,” said Doba on this week’s Pac-10 Conference coaches’ call when asked if this was the most challenging time he’s been through. But then he went on to point out a harder time.
“We had the time back, I think it was the year we went to the Rose Bowl, had we not done well that year with Coach (Mike) Price, we had the same type of criticism.”
Doba could have been talking about a couple of stretches in Price’s tenure at WSU.
Prior to the Cougars’ 1997 Rose Bowl season they had two losing seasons. After the Rose Bowl appearance, the Cougars had three consecutive losing years, winning just three Pac-10 games in that stretch.
But the 2001 season turned it around for the Cougs, and the 10-2 year was followed by two 10-3 seasons, the last coming in Doba’s first year replacing Price.
Since then WSU is 17-22. This week, the heat has been turned up on Doba and the staff following a 48-20 loss to Arizona in Tucson, dropping the Cougars to 0-2 in the Pac-10.
“We’re five games into the season, we’ve lost three,” said Doba early in the week. “One to No. 1 in the nation, another one to No. 5 in the nation.”
And one to the unranked Wildcats, which prompted a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in which Doba was asked if he were going to quit. His answer was simple: no.
He reiterated that Wednesday, and went further.
“We’ve got all these kids here who we told we would be here for them,” Doba said, including the assistant coaches in the statement. “We’re just going to keep working, coaching them up and trying to get better.
“The worst part about stories like that is they end up in the hands of the recruits. That makes it tougher. We don’t do that. I tell kids if a coach has to talk bad about another program, they have nothing good to say about their program.”
This week there has been quite a bit of bad-mouthing of the Cougars’ program and coaches on fan-based Web sites and discussion groups.
“You can’t worry about all that,” Doba said. “You just have to go about all your business.”
When asked if it was a distraction, quarterback Alex Brink answered, “No, not really.
“I think Coach Doba does a good job of handling that and I think he shoulders more than he should. He does a good job of deflecting that away from the team so we don’t have to hear about it a lot.”
Brink also believes the Cougars’ struggles aren’t Doba-based.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with him,” the senior said emphatically.
The Cougars are getting ready to face No. 18 Arizona State on Saturday at homecoming. Wednesday they had their most enthusiastic practice of the season, which is a turnaround from earlier in the week.
“I think guys are a little down right now,” Brink said Tuesday. “It’s tough. (The Arizona loss) was a tough game and that was a pretty solid kick to the gut. But we got a good group of leaders, a good group of guys who are ready to get everybody back up on the horse and that starts today.
“We’re in a pretty good hole right now, you start 0-2 in this league and you got some ground to make up. We need to be focused on taking it one day at a time. We can’t start pressing too much and start thinking too far ahead. We need to stay focused on this week and we need to get this one.”
If they do, safety Husain Abdullah thinks it will make a huge difference in the perception of the season.
“This game would do more than (get our swagger back),” he said. “It would go from ‘everything’s terrible’ and this and that to ‘they turned a new corner’ and whatever people will say. It just takes one.”