A peek behind the meetings that led to WSU’s final pitch to QB John Mateer

PULLMAN – About a week before quarterback John Mateer decided to leave Washington State and enter the transfer portal, ending his three-year tenure with the program, the brains behind WSU’s NIL teams met several times to prepare a pitch.

Members of the Cougar Collective, WSU’s main NIL team, and the Cougar Athletic Fund, the fundraising arm directly affiliated with the university, met multiple times to discuss their NIL offer to Mateer. The final number extended into the $1M range, head coach Jake Dickert said on Monday, indicating that several campaigns the CC ran – launching the Ol’ Crimson Lager, Ol’ Crimson coffee, match campaigns and securing new memberships – helped pave the way for that kind of money.

It fell well short of the roughly $3M offers Mateer was getting even before he entered the portal on Monday, according to multiple reports, but the Cougar Collective and CAF designed a plan to try and keep Mateer in Pullman. Members met in person in Pullman on Dec. 6 and via Zoom on Dec. 9.

In those meetings, officials talked over the funds available to offer Mateer and what their official pitch would look like. The first meeting included around 13 people, according to WSU great Jack Thompson, a Cougar Collective board member. Among them were Thompson, CC treasurer Tim Brandle, CC board member Luke Wetzstein (who drove from Seattle to Pullman for the meeting), boosters and CC members Kim and Rick Wood as well as Brian Hurley and wife Cassie Hurley, who help run Hurley Media Group, a marketing arm that has helped produce commercials featuring Mateer.

It also included CAF officials like senior associate athletic director Adam Ganders, assistant AD for student experience Nick Garner, chief compliance officer Brad Corbin and Ike Ukaegbu, a deputy athletic director at WSU.

That meeting took place in a room in Bohler Gym, a multipurpose building on the WSU campus that houses the Cougs’ volleyball arena plus several practice gyms and classrooms. It lasted about three hours as members put heads together to put together their pitch to Mateer. On top of figuring out a dollar amount to offer Mateer, CC and CAF brass also worked on lining up commercials for Mateer to appear in, not unlike the Northern Quest Casino spot that is currently running, as another revenue stream for Mateer.

Three days later, these members met again over Zoom, also in preparation for their final presentation to Mateer. This meeting didn’t last nearly as long, Thompson said, only about 11/2 hours.

That was to polish off their final pitch to Mateer, which took place last Tuesday in the Cougar Football Complex, Thompson said. That meeting included far fewer people: Mateer was joined by Brandle and Garner, who are closest to Mateer among the group, plus a couple of other officials. That’s when Mateer was presented with the Cougar Collective’s final offer.

“This speaks volumes in terms of why we’re here and how many people view this as important enough to leave during the workday,” Thompson said, “and speak highly of John. We saw him as that important.”

“The biggest thing is just that we wanted to tell John that we loved him, that we cared about him,” Garner said, “and hopefully paint a picture of what that could look like if he stayed here. We finished it by thanking him for all that he did for our university, telling him that we really cared about him and wishing him the best in whatever he decided. Hoping that that was gonna be here, but also knowing that he had big decisions to make.”

At the end of that conversation, Garner said, Mateer expressed gratitude for the work it took for officials put their presentations together. Mateer understood how much he was loved, Garner said, and told the brass he needed to spend time with his family before making a decision. Mateer spent part of the weekend with his family to celebrate his sister, McKayla’s graduation from Missouri S&T in Rolla, Missouri.

“Just really wanted to provide him with that space and that opportunity to really work through all of that,” Garner said.

On the football team, the news circulated around Sunday evening, which is when Mateer alerted coaches and teammates that he would be entering the transfer portal. He told Dickert he appreciated the program, Dickert said, before passing on his decision.

Dickert felt good about the offer, he said, calling it “strong.”

“It was everything that I could have imagined and more. Really proud of that,” Dickert said. “I think our team of people were really invested in that. So yes, that was a big-time deal by our people, and I thought that was really special.”

In the end, it wasn’t enough to keep Mateer, who might be a candidate to follow former WSU offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle and QBs coach John Kuceyeski to Oklahoma, where both men took jobs last week. But to Dickert and the officials who helped put together the final presentation, it adds up to an encouraging development for a program that has often found itself behind on the NIL front.

In their eyes, the thinking is simple: If they can come up with around $1M to try and keep Mateer in Pullman, they can now field much more competitive offers than the CC was capable of in years past, keeping up with the NIL arms race that now colors this college football ecosystem.

It’s unclear whether the money the Cougar Collective put together for Mateer can now be repurposed for NIL deals for other players. But to the people who helped raise it in the first place, it remains something of an encouraging sign.

“They are rallying, they are doing really great things,” Dickert said. “And then sometimes I would imagine there’s probably a little bit of frustration when guys do leave. So I think there’s a mix of a bunch of different emotions, I would imagine, which is, I think, fair for everybody. But at the end of the day, just really proud of our fan base and really the collective and what they have done to put this all together.”