How Much Longer Can the Beavers Stand Pat With Mike Riley?

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Thursday, October 30, 2014

Hank Stern, GoLocalPDX Contributor

For Oregon State football fans, it’s “wait ‘til next year” … again.

And with its competitors in the Pac-12 Conference going out in the last three years and getting big-name coaches who have won elsewhere, the question arises: At what point does the fan base demand OSU do the same and replace Mike Riley?

Any Pac-12 fan knows the Beavers will always have a hard time competing against larger schools with longer football traditions that are in bigger cities with sunnier climates. And Riley gets deserved credit for laying the groundwork during his first stint as OSU coach in 1997 and 1998 for the Beavers’ subsequent glory years under his successor Dennis Erickson.

But since losing the 2009 Civil War to Oregon to determine whether the Beavers or the Ducks went to the Rose Bowl after that season, the Beavers have tread water with an 18-22 record in conference play. Their most recent Pac-12 loss – 38-14 last Saturday to Stanford – drops OSU to 1-3 in league this season with a 4-3 overall record, thanks in large part to a middling at best non-conference schedule.

Winnable games do lie ahead for OSU over the next two weekends against Cal and Washington State before a tough final stretch of home games against Arizona State and Oregon sandwiching a trip to Washington. But can Beavers fans really be excited with another 6-6 or 7-5 overall record that means one more year of having competed merely to stay bowl-eligible for consideration by the low-wattage Vegas and Hawaii bowls of the college football firmament.

And can they really be excited about standing pat the last 11-plus years with Riley while other Pac-12 schools have done the following in just the last three years:

• Arizona in 2012 hired Rich Rodriguez, who coached West Virginia four times to shares of or outright Big East titles in a five-year stretch.
• Washington State in 2012 hired Mike Leach, who coached Texas Tech to five top-25 finishes in a six-year stretch.
• Washington this year hired Chris Petersen, who coached Boise State to a 92-12 overall record, bringing a school with many of the same limitations as Oregon State’s to national prominence.

 

How much longer can Oregon State stand pat while other schools are at least trying to make changes?  Not all coaching changes work out, of course and there’s a reason guys like Rodriguez and Leach were available  -- they had been canned from their previous jobs.

But to sit back and do nothing in Corvallis, saying that Riley is the best OSU can do, seems needlessly defeatist when nobody else in the Pac 12 seems to follow that “this is the best we can do” ethos.

After all, when Riley left Oregon State after the 1998 season for the NFL, the Beavers went out and got a coach who had won national championships at Miami before he became available again atfer compiling a sub.-500 record in his next stop – with Seattle in the NFL.

His name was Dennis Erickson, and the 11-1 record his 2000 team had – along with a top-five finish and rout of Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl – should tell every Beavers fan they don’t have to be content to live this life of Riley.

A native Oregonian, Hank Stern had a 24-year career in journalism, working for more than a decade as a reporter with The Associated Press in Oregon, New Jersey and Washington, DC. He worked seven years for The Oregonian as a reporter in east Multnomah County, Washington County and Portland’s City Hall. In 2005, he became Willamette Week’s managing news editor and worked there until 2011.

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