Memory Lane

So lately I’ve found myself with a bit more time on my hands than normal.  DaniBuff is studying for a professional certificaiton exam that will require about 300 hours of studying between now and early October.  It also turns out that when you best friends get married, you don’t see them as much as you would like.  I’m not one to find fun in going fishing or playing golf by one’s self.  So this weekend I found myself parked on the La-Z-Boy with NCAA 12 fired up.  What I didn’t expect was a trip down Crimson memory lane.

So as I grew bored with my Dynasty on Saturday afternoon, I recalled a flurry of texts that SeanHawk and I exchanged earlier in the week.  Hawk had astutely pointed out that the 2006 Cougar Team was available for download in the Teambuilder Mode. After downloading the team and playing a couple of games with them, a flood of memories came to me.  This was a great football team that underachieved more-so than they did the previous season!

How good was the 2006 incarnation of our beloved Cougs?  So damned good they had more than A DOZEN players eventually wind-up on an NFL roster!  Think about this for a minute…

The team had the following players see time on an NFL roster: at some point after leaving Pullman: Jason Hill, Brandon Gibson, Hussain Abdullah, Eric Frampton, Ropati Pitoitua, Tyrone Brackenridge, Mike Bumpus, Cody Boyd, Jed Collins Steve Dildine, Alex Brink, Chirs Ivory, Mkristo Bruce.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME, 13 GUYS SPENT SOME TIME IN THE NFL!?  How did this group not get us to a bowl game?!

Eventhough it was nearly five years ago, the 2006 season is still, freshly engrained in my memory. It was my first season of Cougar football, post graduation.  I had my first big-boy job, with nice commissions where I wore a shirt and tie to work every day and thought I was the next Ari Gold.  At the time, home ownership, a Roth IRA, car payment and a family were the furthest thing from my mind.  So Cougar Football, and the Cougar Cottage was the recipient of my hard earned dollars.

Lucky for me, I had a ton of friends on their Victory Laps in Pullman, a few other friends on the team and a couple of really close friends that worked for the team.  If memory serves  me correctly, I attended every game of the 2006 season except at Auburn, at Stanford and Arizona. How awkward would it have been to show up in Pullman to crash with my boys on Dad’s Weekend?  Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

The 2006 season started off with extremely high hopes for our Cougs as we were coming off the most disappointing season in recent memory, yet still loaded to the gills with talent. In 2005, we went 4-8 overall, 1-7 in-conference. That was the year where Doba & Co. invented ways to lose games. 

Up 28-0 to UCLA, only to lose 44-41 in OT; Losing 44-33 in Corvallis after leading by 14 at intermission; inexcusably losing to a dogshit Stanford team 24-21 at home; Dropping one at Cal 44-38, after having erased an 18 point halftime deficit, and leading by as many as ten in the middle of the 4th Quarter; Taking three points off the board, and the lead, when ASU is called for a penalty on a Langley FG make to lose 27-24 on Dad’s Weekend; Finally, the loss against Oregon on a last minute hail mary and then FG conversion as the clock expired.

Oh wait Lucas, I thought we were talking about the 2006 season?  Well, that’s what I was leading you to believe, but clearly, 2005 was just as disappointing of a season as well, and his inability to close out close games is the main reason Bill Doba was not retained after the 2007 season. Well you might tell me Doba was fired because he didn’t recruit and his players got into a lot of trouble off the gridiron.  Do you truly think Doba and Co. would have been fired if they went bowling in 2005 and 2006 and then posted five wins in 2007?

In 2006 we started 6-3 with our only losses to far superior Auburn, Cal and USC squads. We faded down the stretch losing our final three to end the year, but at 6-6, many thought we would still be selected for a bowl game. However, we wre not selected and a 6-6 UCLA was selected to a bowl game that year even though we kicked the piss out of them in the Pasadena that year. On a side note, the Rose Bowl for a UCLA home game has to be one of the worst atmosphere’s I’ve ever taken in for a game day. 

So tying all of this together now.

If Bill Doba closed out half of the conference games he lost in 2005 and 2006, all of which we were in-position to win late in the game or we were highly favored to win, we would have won seven and eight games in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Now couple his entire body of work, and his record would have been 35-23 following 2007.  35-23 at Wazzu, with bowl appearances in three out of five seasons is hardly grounds for dismissal. In fact, WSU would have probably been fighting pretty hard for Doba not to leave Pullman for a “better job.”

Let’s say we extended Doba after 2007 for five more seasons. Having the roster we had in 2008 and 2009 would he have won more than three games total? Maybe, but you don’t know. The 2008 and 2009 teams saw Brandon Gibson, Gary Rogers, Reid Forrest and Kenny Alfred get a crack at the NFL.  If he couldn’t go bowling with a roster of 13 future NFL players in one season, what makes you think he would do any better than 5-32 with a roster that saw four guys in three years wind up in the NFL?

Not only that, but had we extended Doba, could you honestly forsee the talent on our roster improving?  Absolutely not! Where would the WSU program be today, if we didn’t cut ties with him until after the disaster that was 2009?  People call Wulff a bad coach, his roster has been in such bad shape, he has hardly been afforded the chance to close-out a win.  I hate to use this phrase, but when has Paul Wulff ever “Couged It” for us?

Doba couldn’t close games if he were Trevor Hoffman!