Dave Boling: WSU football coach Jimmy Rogers gets to the point, he’s in the business of proving people wrong
Feb. 1, 2025 Updated Sat., Feb. 1, 2025 at 4:36 p.m.
Photo by Jesse Tinsley/Spokesman Review
New coaches get dragged around regional media outlets to face redundant inquiries from reporters eager to shape a few biographical tidbits into broad assumptions and grand projections.
Some coaches have the knack for this part of the job, even have fun with it. Washington State has had some beauties over the decades. Those skills don’t always correlate to competitive successes.
Last week, WSU’s new football coach Jimmy Rogers made the rounds in the state, including a Friday afternoon visit to a news room in Spokane.
He arrived early, ready to get started, unveiling his dominant characteristic: Linebacker Eyes.
He’s 37, but the man still has Linebacker Eyes.
Anybody who has spent much time around football can identify them: High beams. Hyperfocused. Scanning, piercing. Ready to read and react.
Rogers doesn’t keep his eyes at the full-samurai setting during the interview, but they remain keen. He is all business.
I had prepped a list of questions that would fill the generous 45-minute time window we’d been given.
Surely, by now, most of the answers had become rote, with scarce demand for deep thought.
I wondered if: Behind those eyes, while voicing answers to predictable inquiries, he actually might be designing a defensive scheme for next fall’s opener – like a computer with a program operating behind the display.
Focused. Intense. Time-efficient. Rogers appears a man eager to get back to the important work that awaits.
We finished the interview in 24 minutes.
• Rogers is used to covering a lot of ground in a hurry. He made more than 300 tackles in four seasons as linebacker at South Dakota State.
It’s an impressive development for a lightly recruited player out of Hamilton High in Chandler, Arizona. Rogers had been an all-state pick on a two-time state title team, but his 5-foot-10 height didn’t match what most colleges would consider the prototype.
The highly successful head coach of SDSU, John Stiegelmeier, gave Rogers his chance, encouraging him all the way, and eventually supporting him as coaching heir.
Having been an overlooked prospect seems an obvious motivational factor for Rogers.
“It creates a certain level of drive, naturally, and you develop habits that most people don’t have to,” Rogers said. “It’s who I’ve always been, my whole life.”
• That can-do mindset and persistent toughness extend back to before he played football, perhaps genetically, to a deeper source.
“Probably from my dad,” Rogers said.
Rogers said his father had been a Chicago Police Department officer for 18 years, working in the Cabrini-Green housing projects, notorious for gang violence, crime and “lots of murders,” Rogers said.
“He moved us away when I was 2, to Arizona, to try to create a better life for us,” Rogers said. “When we moved, he had to start all over … we were pretty broke.”
• In Rogers’ two seasons as head coach at SDSU, the Jackrabbits went 27-3, with a national FCS championship in 2023.
When he took over from Stiegelmeier, Rogers was quoted: “I want to win, don’t get me wrong, I do. But the real purpose of competition isn’t just to win, it’s to test the limits of the human art, and to push the boundaries of who you are.”
Pretty philosophical for a linebacker? Perhaps, but not for a man trying to convince young men how to meet and exceed their athletic potential. It’s the kind of goal that transcends the win totals.
Rogers not only believes the Cougars can win, but also push the boundaries, test the limits.
He pointed out to his players that Boise State made it into the 12-team College Football Playoff championship series. BSU will be a member of the new Pacific-12 Conference with the Cougars. If BSU can challenge for a championship, WSU can, too.
Washington State’s new head football coach Jimmy Rogers and his family walk with athletic director Anne McCoy (back right) to a press conference where he was introduced as the university’s new head football coach on Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, at Gesa Field in Pullman, Wash. (Geoff Crimmins/For The Spokesman-Review)
• Rogers spent 19 years, more than half his life, in Brookings, South Dakota. So, he was certainly not a job candidate put off by the pastoral pace of life in Pullman.
“It’s not for everybody,” he said. “A lot of people come into towns like that and say there’s not enough to do, that it’s too rural. Another way to look at it is, because you’re more remote, relationships matter, people matter, communities matter.”
SDSU and WSU share the high degree of “community buy-in,” he said. “Everywhere I’ve been has been pretty much die-hard Cougs. Nobody is halfway in.”
The university and the athletes and staff are a large part of the societal ecosystem in such a place.
“You’ve got to get to know people, create relationships, make them feel comfortable,” he said. “Get to know their families and develop a true relationship outside of just football.”
• Rogers has called himself a “very transparent person.”
And if you don’t like what you see, well, “that doesn’t affect me.”
Meetings with the alums and boosters and fans, thus far, have been very positive, he said.
He was asked what he thought of doing the kind of media interview that was, at that moment, winding down.
“I hate it,” he said. “Doing the media thing and getting (in front) of the camera is not my thing.”
No offense taken.
• Is there one thing above the others that provides the great internal reward for Rogers as a coach?
“Taking a player from Point A to graduation,” he said. “That’s the joy. I’m typically used to recruiting a kid that hasn’t had many opportunities, so it’s like me helping that kid to prove people wrong, just like I had to do.”
