We lost Mateer? Not surprising, but this is news to me.There seems to be a higher than normal amount of critical posts on Dickert on here, and I'm not understanding the rationale for that.
I consider myself to be a fairly objective WSU booster, and this season played out where I had hoped that it would back in August. I thought the ceiling was 7-8 wins, which is exactly where we ended up. There were a couple of games that got away late, but we also won at Wisconsin (yea, they were down, but we didn't know that in the preseason). The Apple Cup was a great game and we lost to a much better than anticipated UW team. Look at the top 4 or 5 teams in the P12, and our games vs. them were very competitive.
What's particularly vexing to me is how quickly people have pivoted from their "Dickert won't be able to put together a good staff" comments to dismissing the fact that his top-2 coordinators both received promotions recently; Morris to a head coaching position. Doesn't it signal respect when the inner circles of the coaching world when are looking favorably at how Dickert's program is being run?
Our 2023 recruiting class is mostly complete. I believe we have 19 kids verbaled, with another 2-3 on the hook. Dickert said that the hires should be completed no later than January 8th, and media sources have said that the OC/DC candidates are already in place or down to a top-2 candidate list. That sounds like a normal timeline.
We lost Mateer because we were outbid by NIL dollars. Some kids are now being offered $800K/year plus signing bonuses. That's not something that Dickert can overcome. I saw that we already have an offer extended to another high school QB out of California, which indicates to me that the coaches have their recruiting pipeline structured appropriately.
Sorry for the long message. It's a slow day at work. I'm just not seeing the red flags about Dickert and our program that some of you are propagating.
If this is true, this is going to be hard to stay positive.