SoCal, what's your thoughts on what the adminstration could've done to keep CML from leaving after the 2019 season?
Sounds Like Chun And Schulz have given up!
- Thread starter Cougsocal
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SoCal, what's your thoughts on what the adminstration could've done to keep CML from leaving after the 2019 season?
Not SoCal …but nothing . I will say if he was in Pullman he would probably still be alive today … and would make college football more palatable
May I make a recommendation … go grab dinner with the 23 year old maybe you would be a smidge less of a grumping old dude
Two reasons… he walked to his job every day . In Mississippi he lived I think a 20
Minute drive from campus.
Second, his closest friend in Pullman was not football or athletic department related . He was as good a friend as one could have and leach listened to him.
When Leach had pneumonia in 2022 I truly believe his best friend in Pullman plus the administration would have convinced him to step away until he was 100% and had all the tests run . He looked bad in October and should have stepped away for several months if not six .
The only chance we had was to make him an offer he couldn't refuse, and the only hope of that would have been to have been money smart all along. We did our job in Leach's mind, we rehabbed him in the mind of the greater college world, and he had been looking to move on for quite some time. Sadly for us, it was always strictly business for him. You have to wonder had he stayed and been alive, would we, not ASU be in the Big -12 right now. That man and his media presence, you never know.
Agree with all that.
Mike got it in his head he would not have a complete coaching carreer if he did not coach in the SEC. Ironically although he was mildly successful there ( good luck to MSU ever having a 9-win season again) it turned out to not be a terrible decision for his health and for WSU. You could tell that atomsphere in Miss. was never a fit ( not a major surprise ) and he was never relaxed .His normal humor was always forced and misunderstood.
The Big 12 situation would have also been interesting . Make no mistake having him at the helm boosted TV ratings in the big market of Texas. That was not just because of his personality, his pure air raid offense is what you will see every Friday night in Texas Highschool football. Also the networks always looking for something to spark interest would have have a had an easy one when WSU played Tech or even Okie State, Baylor and TCU.
Great post social
A lot of food for thought, just as with CougED's post on the same situation
Tron nor you have ever pointed anything out that makes sense. WSU in 2007 gave up 53 to OSU at home, Oregon 52, Arizona 48, USC 47, and a ball control team in Wisconsin 42. Now imagine what the scores would have been if Brink wasn't there to gain first downs. Easily in the 60's.
We lost our two DT's that could help stop the run. Again, Brink wasn't there to kill minutes on the clock by having some sustained drives. Look at the number of three and outs Rogers, Lopina, and Lobster had.
Please go player by player and tell me who on offense and defense would start for the first five teams in the conference. Two maybe three....Kenny A our center, he probably would start for the number four team in our conference. And Gibson could start for any team number three on down.
Now tell me who would start for the top eight teams in the conference, and it might be the same two. Who do you think Matt Eichlebarger starts for? Matt Mullinix, Michael Graise, Romeo Pellum, Jason Stribling, X Hicks, Chima at corner...I could go player by player and state maybe Greg Trent could styart for the number 7 team in the conference.
BACK TO THE WULF APAULOGIST TRASH
No one's going to play your game ED and get sucked into that again.
Your in the extreme MINORITY that are APAULOGIST, that DEFENDS WULF, while attacking Doba.
You have been proved wrong, many times, have lost the APAULOGIST FORUM WARS between you and Tron and Biggs and others.
Not going to REHASH all that stuff. Your wrong, period.
talk to the Hand APAULOGIST
And enjoy getting ignored, as no one is going to change their mind, listen to you, etc.
Just STFU up about PAUL WULF and Doba.
No one wants to hear about it you APAULOGIST.
Now back to stuff like NON WULF stuff, football, etc
A team that returned 75% of its starters, include two future long term NFL players became the worst team statistically in history in every meaningful category, in conference play, under Wulff. What more need be said. Oh yes, the 4 conference wins in 4 years was less than Craig Fertig, previously consider the worst coach ever, in his four years at OSU. In fairness to Craig, he inherited a 1-10 Beaver team. I'm sure Ed will now argue that that Beaver team was far more talented than the 5-7 75% returners team Wulff inherited.
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Coach Walden's comments might have had a lot do with those perceptions.
He reiterated on many occasions that CPW was facing a monumental rebuilding job.
People back then tended to believe whatever Coach Walden said about the Cougs. I'm probably guilty of that myself.
We are back to arguing about how horrible a coach Wulff was. Lol!
If Ed keeps bad mouthing Bill Doba for leaving the cupboard bare, when he gave Wulff 17 returning starter, include an NFL receiver and RB, from a 5-7 team, you have keep saying bull shit over and over. You really want me to let Ed revise history.
And now he's the head coach at UC Poly-San Luis Obispo.
It'd be something if they ended up on WSU's non-conference schedule on account of the shuffling going on right now.
There could be a "Paul Wulff Week" at CougZone. Tron might even make a return for that one 😆
I could sidetrack to the lack of effectiveness of Covid mandates, if you'd like.
It was everyone associate with Cougar athletics, basically. What else could they say after the wheels had completely come off after game 5, which is about when the revisionism started. Did we really expect them to be honest? "We mistakenly hired a guy who was utter convinced of his own grandeur, who pointed fingers at everyone but himself, creating an utterly toxic locker room environment! Then you lose 69-0 and it is only that close because Pete Carroll is a class act and because Cougs were trying to take the air out of the ball from the get go, passing only 9 times all game. You have to create a fiction to save face. Despicable treatment of Bill Doba! No other word for it.
Bill consistently did less with more, wasting the talent Price left behind and 2 top 25 recruiting classes of his own, that is the Doba story.
To be fair, Doba was f-ed by his Cougar alum heavy assistants. They recruited like shit, Ken Greene was boinking his assistant, as Doba dealt with his wife's cancer and ultimate death.
That is the Doba story. A great Coug.
I didn't realize that one was a secret. Thought it was pretty well known.
Doba's first couple of recruiting classes buried his later teams. They were rated well, but that doesn't reflect the number of kids who failed to qualify/show up. With the amount of continuity we had, we probably could have gotten by with some decent classes following those up, but by then Doba was watching his wife die and the assistants weren't doing their jobs.
What we ended up with was a lot of returning starters without much depth, with only enough gas to play 3 quarters because the S&C coach was incompetent. Then the new coach either alienated them from day 1 or sent them packing. Worst of all worlds.
Bill Doba is a great guy, and a great Coug. Met him a time or two. Maybe not the best head coach, but not for a lack of trying. Biggest mistake was hiring all the lazy Coug assistants who f-ed him over when they could have had his back.
I got to know Paul Wulff's brother in the 2010 season. He and I talked about the situation that Paul inherited and I got to meet Paul before the AC. Here's the deal....Wulff was told that the team was full of drug users and miscreants that didn't respect the opportunity being given to them and was told that he had free rein to clean house as necessary. He burned the place to the ground including the foundation in that process.
From my perspective, he didn't have to destroy the program as badly as he did and his biggest miscalculation was overestimating his ability to rebuilt what he destroyed. He thought he had more time but he failed to understand by wrecking the program so badly, he created a situation where the AD couldn't support him anymore. Biggs like to yell about "LOSERS!" and unfortunately for Wulff, his inept handling of those first two years created an atmosphere where WSU players no longer really believed that they could win. We lost three games in 2011 that we should have won (SDSU, UCLA and Utah) because his players didn't know how to win and that cost him his job.
Where would WSU be if we don't choke in those games? We'll never know and frankly, I believe that we were better off with those losses because it gave us Leach. What is my rant about? A better coach would have avoided that 2008 debacle. It wasn't about the talent left on the team....it was about a mandate to clean things up and a coach who was in over his head.
EDIT: I wanted to add that Paul Wulff was an arrogant jerk when I met him. His brother was actually a good dude, but I was not impressed with Paul.
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Used to be a new coach got 5 years pretty much even if the team wasn't doing well.
Then it dropped to 4 years (like CPW got)
Now it's pretty much 3 years if you perform under expectations at a Power 5 school like WSU.
Or 2 sub-par years at a traditionally successful program with deep pockets.
CPW might've been a little naive about outside expectations at WSU.
Yes. And he had selflessly donated $100,000 of his first years salary to be divided between those assistants when he agreed to take over after Price left.
That is one side of the story, and if I were Paul Wulff's brother I'd rationalize too. The other side of the story is that the Cougs hired the male version of Jenny Przekwas. In suppor, of the former, a "change of culture" was the theme of the 2008 outlook. However, when you look at Wulff's horrendous recruiting #87, #92 #90 out of 100 D1 schools, at the time, at a Power 5 school, being out recruited by UTEP, W. Kentucky, NM ST. and Akron and a host of other similar schools, the word appears to have been out in recruiting circles that Wulff didn't run off a few bad apples to change culture, he WAS the bad apple. Then their was "the cupboard was bare" campaign, slandering Bill Doba. Then you have the campaign in year 3, trotting out his utterly tragic upbringing and subsequent heart breaking personal story, in an effort to humanize him. That smacks of a further attempt at damage control.
I remain more persuaded by the later story. The pieces fit far better.
Never had heard about that side of CPW before.
Not very flattering for sure.
Hopefully he's turned things around and will do better at San Luis Obispo
A great man and the kids loved him, but not getting us to a bowl game with NFLer Jerome Harrison running for 1900 yards, in the backfield, NFLers Jason Hill and Brandon Gibson, plus Michael Bumphus out wide, that was damn hard to do.
We started making the top 10 Fulmer cup standings a regular thing.
There was a culture problem.
The only salvation at that point would have been to bring in a HUGE name coach that could bring in talent after running off all the drug users and miscreants. And yes, Doba's staff holds a big part of that responsibility.
That being said, CPW was still a lousy coach and ended the careers of three qbs in one night.
I said above that Wulff was in over his head.....but to be fair, his 2011 class was rated #72 by Rivals and he had landed 9 of the 22 guys who were in the 2012 class before he was fired. That class was rated #56 and the list of his recruits included five of the seven offensive linemen. He had started to turn things around....but he still needed to be fired and I don't believe that he would have ever gotten us to 11 wins like Leach did. At best, we would have been a team that would have occasionally made a bowl game and that's not what any self respecting fan is shooting for.
You don't get next level bad from one season to the next returning most of the prior season's team that went 5-7 unless something is very rotten. I don't have any first hand knowledge. But...
Isn't is funny though, "the criminal element" weren't run off until after the collapse, and wasn't the initial story the the cupboard was bare to begin with? I guess it was bare with a criminal element. Seems like Wulff and Co. weren't quite sure on the blame messaging, initially. Also isn't it funny that a coach "building a program the right way," at a power 5 program, would be battling for the worst recruiting classes in all the land every year? An albino beagle can recruit in the top 65 at a power 5 school, but Dudley Do Right somehow couldn't?
Weird!
You are being quite generous proclaiming that the turnaround had begun based on a recruiting classes that would be simply bad for any other power 5 coach out there. That #72 "Mike Price-like" recruiting class might have been an aberration. I don't see recruits beating down the door to play for a coach heading into his lame duck season, with only 4 conference wins in 4 years.
Get real!
Feel free that I also included that Wulff's ceiling was still likely too low and not anything that a self respecting fan would root for. Bringing that to the present...assuming that we are still playing football in another couple years, if we haven't won at least 8 games, there are going to be a lot of fans questioning whether Dickert is the solution. Heck, we know at least one poster on here who hates him already after back to back 7 win seasons.
I’m not convinced that we were a better team with Tuel in 2011.
Lobbestael threw for 300+ five times in 2011, and registered the 2nd highest completion percentage in WSU history. Tuel threw for 300+ five times in his career - three of them after Wulff was gone.
Tuel never seemed comfortable in Wulff’s offense. Lobbestael just went out and sling the ball.
More significantly, there were only 2 close losses in 2011 - UCLA & Utah. Tuel probably gets us in the end zone inside the 10 better than Lobbestael did, so maybe we win UCLA with him. He doesn’t keep the D from forgetting how to cover the pass though. Tuel does not beat Utah. His collarbone would have exploded first time he took one of the dozen that Halliday did.
Were you aware that the Lobster played better in 2011, than Jeff Tuel did at any point in his career, bar none? Including under Mike Leach! A QBR of 138 is pretty solid, significant better than Ward did last year. If Tuel can only throw 8 TDs (8 Int) with a QBR of 119 in the Air Raid, what make you believe he was going to throw 20+ TD under the Wulff system and generate a QBR of 138+?
More Wulff mythology possibly!
I included SDSU in my list because we are leading in that game 24-14 in the third quarter. Because that team didn't know how to win....they relaxed and let SDSU obliterate them in the second half and gave up 28 straight points. Roughing the kicker penalty, a busted 64 yard run for a TD and a late pick in desperation time took a close game and made it fugly. FWIW, Lobbestael had a QBR of 39.0 in that game. Oof. That team had no idea how to win.
