COMMENTARY: WSU’s football future depends on people who want to be there

Minutes after Washington State’s Holiday Bowl loss to No. 1 Syracuse, senior linebacker Kyle Thornton gave his two cents on Cougar football’s future.

“I know it’s pretty easy to keep track of the ones who don’t want to be a part of the team, but the Cougs who wanna be Cougs, they’re a little harder to track, but they’re in there,” Thornton said.“I know it’s a little doom and gloom for the Cougs right now, but there’s sunny days coming. There (are) sunny times coming, I do believe that, and the future Cougs are gonna go find it.”

The day after WSU’s 52-35 DirecTV Holiday Bowl loss in San Diego to finish the season at 8-5, athletic director Anne McCoy hired Jimmy Rogers of South Dakota State as the Cougars’ next head football coach, finding the man tasked with creating “the sunny days” that Thornton speaks of.

Thornton made four tackles on Friday in his final game in the crimson and gray, but his legacy transcends his on-field accomplishments.

While many fans will remember Thornton’s goal-line tackle of Husky running back Jonah Coleman to seal WSU’s 2024 Apple Cup victory in Seattle, the six-year Coug will be remembered most fondly as a steady leader who set an example for his teammates.

The future team captain walked on to the late coach Mike Leach’s Cougs in 2019, earned a scholarship in 2021 and made his first start in the 2022 LA Bowl after the starters had transferred ahead of the game.

Two years later, he faced a similar situation with over 30 teammates in the portal, but this time, his teammates voted to allow players in the portal to play in the bowl game.

That decision led directly to WSU’s third touchdown of the Holiday Bowl, when Leon Neal Jr., who is in the portal, blocked Syracuse’s punt and San Diego-native Josh Meredith, who is also in the portal, grabbed the ball and returned it 12 yards for a touchdown to give WSU a 21-14 lead over the Orange late in the first quarter.

The Cougars entered the game as 17-point underdogs. The defense, missing half of its starters, could do little to stop the nation’s leading passer Kyle McCord and the high-octane Syracuse offense.

McCord passed for over 450 yards and surpassed former Clemson QB Deshaun Watson’s 2016 ACC single-season passing record.

However, WSU’s offense, led by backup quarterback Zevi Eckhaus making his first start for the Cougs after sitting behind John Mateer, turned in a respectable 363-yard, four-touchdown performance (three passing, one rushing) and kept the Cougs in a one-score game until the fourth quarter.

Senior wide receiver Kyle Williams, by far the best Wazzu receiver in years, surpassed Dez Bryant’s Holiday Bowl-receiving yards record with 10 catches for 172 yards. He took a slant pass 66 yards to the end zone in the first quarter and accounted for nearly half of WSU’s passing offense.

It was a fitting conclusion to Williams’ five-year college career, which began amid the pandemic in 2020 at UNLV and ended with the Inglewood, Calif., native making at least one catch in each of his final 50 college football games and finishing 2024 inside of the nation’s top five in receiving touchdowns with 14.

“It’s been a long college journey for me, and it’s been (a) roller coaster, a lot of ups and downs,” Williams said. “But to finish it off where a lot of things went left, and you just see the commitment of everybody, just the brotherhood, camaraderie of the team, it was something special. If I could do it again, I would do it over and over and over.”

Thornton, Williams and the 96 other Cougs who played in the Holiday Bowl gave Coug fans something to smile about in a December riddled with loss.

Over 30 Cougs entered the transfer portal, some to seek big paydays like Mateer — who is set to earn about $3 million as Oklahoma’s QB — and others to follow coaches or seek new opportunities after former WSU coach Jake Dickert left Pullman for Wake Forest.

The next few weeks may be hard for the Cougar faithful as fan favorites such as center Devin Kylany and wide receiver Carlos Hernandez enter the portal and may follow their position coaches, Jared Kaster and Nick Edwards, to Wake Forest or seek opportunity elsewhere.

Rogers — a two-time Football Championship Subdivision national champion, once in 2022 as South Dakota State’s defense coordinator and again in 2023 as the Jackrabbits’ head coach — has his work cut out for him.

He will need to assemble a staff that can handle the unique recruiting challenges of the Palouse and build a 2025 roster.

Rogers will lead WSU through a unique independent 2025 schedule that includes road trips to Ole Miss and Virginia and two games against Oregon State. WSU welcomes a reborn Pac-12 in 2026 which will include Boise State, Fresno State and others.

While his introductory news conference will not take place until the week of Jan. 6-10, he has already made a good impression, changing his X (formerly Twitter) username to “@WazzuRogers” and releasing a video over the team’s social media accounts.

“What’s up Wazzu, new head football coach Jimmy Rogers. We can’t wait to get home to the Palouse. Let’s get to work. C’mon, let’s go Cougs,” Rogers said in the video.

Based on reporting from Oregon-based sports reporter John Canzano, Dickert’s departure appeared to be motivated by a perceived lack of support from university leadership, namely outgoing WSU president Kirk Schulz, who dragged his feet on providing the athletic department with additional funds for multiple months after the board of regents instructed him to.

WSU was set to cut the football program’s assistant coaches’ salary pool from $4.9 million in 2024 to $3.5 million in 2025. McCoy said she did not know about the additional funding until after Dickert left, according to Canzano’s reporting.

In the wake of this debacle, Dickert sought another opportunity across the country, taking the last available raft out of Pullman to a Power Four job.

There is a reality where “everybody wins.” Dickert secures a bigger payday, not only for himself and his family but for his colleagues who he has since hired at Wake Forest. He also gets “stability” and the challenge of facing his new in-state neighbor Bill Belichick, the six-time Super Bowl-winning coach who just took over North Carolina’s football program.

For WSU, it grants the school a clear picture of the harm an unsupportive leader can have on its athletic success as the university searches for a new president. Schulz will retire in June.

It also provided McCoy the chance to reboot the football program with a proven winner. Dickert started each of his three seasons 4-1, but slipped down the stretch, going a combined 8-14 over the last seven or eight games of each season.

Rogers was 27-3 in two years as South Dakota State’s headman and possibly brings several of the coaches and players who helped him win the 2023 FCS national championship with him.

Some may squirm at the fact that Rogers will be earning about $1.1 million less than Dickert did. However, the reported $1.57 million that Rogers will earn annually is a meaningful raise for a former FCS coach and means that WSU is perhaps reserving some funds for other aspects of the athletic department. That could include a raise for David Riley, the first-year men’s basketball coach who has started the year 12-3.

Once the Pac-12 has secured a media deal (and added an eighth full member), WSU’s immediate future revenue will be clearer and the Cougs can invest accordingly.

In the meantime, Rogers brings a fascinating combination of youth — the Phoenix native is 37 years old — and experience. He’s a championship-winning coach who wants to be in Pullman.

That’s no guarantee he will stick around or have immediate success.

But after a decade defined by a bowl appearance in eight out of 10 seasons, one coach who thrust WSU back into the national spotlight (Leach), another who put WSU in the national news for non-football reasons (Nick Rolovich) and another who captained the ship through the choppy waters of the death of a century-old conference and a new college football landscape that ravaged Wazzu’s roster every year (Dickert), Rogers is the hire WSU had to make.

And he very well may be the hire they should have made all along.

Taylor can be reached at 208-848-2268, staylor@lmtribune.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @Sam_C_Taylor.