First of all, WSU was not last place in facilities at the time Leach was hired. Anybody who knows the Pac-12 know that is local myth base on an assumption that because we lose consistently, our facilities must be crap. My daughters were going to UCLA and Cal at that time, and USC was still working out of the basement of heritage hall. Cal facilities were a complete joke, their weight room was a former motorpool shed, the stadium had been condemned and the locker room was a 1/4 mile away from the weight room. WSU has alway done a good job of keep facilities up to date. no frills but always very functional and athlete friendly. Yes, we were well behind Oregon, but it was well ahead of everybody. The keeping up with Oregon building boom and updating, conference wide, started with the new TV contract.
How has the building boom helped the conference in terms of competitiveness? 1-8, the worst ever, despite a crappy overall bowl tie in package, 4-11 over the last two seasons. Traditionally with low end facilities, we cleaned up in bowls, our bowl record was always up there with the SEC.
The building boom has been a huge bust, conference wide, because as a conference we lost focus on what you need to win intersectionally (better coaching). The big thing that Bill Moos did for WSU, that most school forgot during the building frenzy, that you may need spend as much as you can to hire a high end coach, rather than cross your fingers that you get lucky in the coaching lotto. While many schools were spending a fortune building like us, they cheaped out, relatively, on the coach hiring front. Bill on the other hand spent more than 3 times more than we had ever done, giving Leach our longest most employee friendly contract ever too.
Now imagine had Bill bucked the conference wide trend and followed our traditional functional, but no frills upgrade building approach, and used, the considerable increase in TV revenue, and associated savings, to stock a "hiring and retention fund" for football and other sports, as well as keep us in the black? We'd have been far better off. Facilities are the salt and pepper, the coach is a program's meat and potatos.
Hiring Leach was one of the great moves in WSU athletics history. Bill deserves praise for that. Ballsy move, considering Leach's reputation. It could have gone so wrong, one off hand comment in frustration early on, and you'd have a guying suing and investigating our arse forever, without a program turnaround. Unfortunately, Bill mismanagement of athletics thereafter can't be ignore either. A great opportunity to put Cougar athletics back on the map, program wide, was lost.