The end of the line for one nice guy
Suggesting that all good things must come to an end, Washington State terminated the five-year tenure of football coach Bill Doba on Monday. Since Doba swore he wouldn’t quit, we’ll take him at his word and presume he was fired, becoming the first football coach cashiered at the school since Bert Clark in 1967.
You could conclude that college football 2007 has officially gone daft. The Cougars just fired a coach for having a winning record, while Washington, once the dreadnought of the West Coast, is apparently OK with Tyrone Willingham going 11-24 in three seasons.
Way back when the Cougars excised Clark, they did it partly because he made some unwise remarks after a thrashing at Stanford, to the effect that he wasn’t certain the Cougars could compete in the old Pac-8 Conference.
The autopsy on Doba: He was fired for being too nice.
Principally, that meant he was willing to delegate major authority to his assistant coaches. He trusted all of them, some too much.
Remember, Doba was hired by WSU at 62, after Mike Price announced in December 2002 he was leaving for Alabama. Doba hadn’t been a head coach since 1976 - when he was guiding Mishawaka High School in Indiana. While there’s no statute against a college head coach having success in his 60s, just about everybody who’s having it established himself in a head position before then.
My sense is that Doba, comfortable in an assistant’s cocoon for 14 seasons under Price, was taken aback by the breadth of a head coach’s responsibilities.
So whenever he could, he delegated. For the most part, he concerned himself with the defense and gave great leeway to the offensive coaches. This fall, he became fond of saying, “Alex Brink knows this offense better than I do.” That may have been true, which is both reassuring and alarming.
His assistants had to love him. They got a long leash, multiyear contracts and peace of mind.
In a conversation four weeks ago, Doba told me, “I want [the assistant] to come to work and be able to relax and say something during the staff meeting and not get his head kicked in. I’ve been in situations where you wonder, ‘What’s gonna go wrong today?’ I don’t want that kind of pressure.
“Some people enjoy making other people miserable - and some are very successful and winning games. That’s not me.”
Which is fine, but ultimately, the head coach has to have a vision. He needs to know every nuance of the offense just as he knows the defense. At WSU, you can’t be a caretaker; you’ve got to be a swashbuckler.
A person who would know says Doba came to rely too much on certain assistants’ opinions on matters such as which recruits could overcome academic hurdles. Time and again the past couple of years, WSU lost prospects who couldn’t get in or who flunked out.
Inevitably, that began taking a toll on the field - in depth, for one. Washington State special teams were mostly a disaster. The Cougars’ Apple Cup victory over Washington is all the more impressive when you consider UW seemed to start every possession on its 43-yard line after a WSU kickoff.
Too often the past couple of years, the Cougars, ironically, were done in by their defense, Doba’s particular expertise. If it wasn’t that, it was a maddening series of botched trick plays - from the misbegotten 2-yard onside kick to start the 2004 game against USC, to a cavalcade of failed fake punts. Those are the kinds of plays that, right or wrong, focus attention on a staff’s preparation.
To the end, Doba was a gentleman to the core. After the Cougars presented him a glittering going-away gift - Saturday’s 42-35 victory over Washington - Doba talked about what a classy rivalry it was and hugged Huskies staffers outside the WSU dressing quarters.
Just a guess, but what WSU faithful would really like now is some of the Dennis Erickson fire of 1987 (”Before I go to bed every night, I’m going to ask myself: What did I do today to beat the Huskies?”). Or that of his predecessor, Jim Walden, who last week in an Internet piece noted some tepid performances of recent, favored WSU teams against UW and said, “I’m talking about really uninspired performances. When I was coaching, that would have been a sacrilege.”
Now, WSU needs somebody to rally the troops in and out of the program, to embrace every last facet of the job, not delegate it, and to persuade boosters to surrender their billfolds in the name of WSU’s stadium renovation.
Some history, ancient though it may be: When WSU fired Clark in 1967, it hired a hard-drinking, swaggering Irishman named Jim Sweeney. He used to fling off his sports jacket in front of basketball crowds and lead a Cougars spell-out. He could sell fur coats in Fort Lauderdale.
One of his signature victories came over Oregon in 1971 in Spokane. The defining play came when WSU, in punt formation, had an upback slip the ball forward between the legs of a halfback named Bernard Jackson, who that day set a school rushing record with 261 yards.
Jackson scored on a 46-yard run on that little ploy. Oregon still hasn’t figured out who had the ball.
So today, the question: Where was Bernard Jackson when Bill Doba needed him?
Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com