Control – Alt – Delete

So that happened. Yowza, what an ass-whoopin’. So much for Senior day, last home game of the season, bowl eligibility on the line, a team playing better vs. a team coming off an emotional home win, blah, blah, BLAH. I didn’t see this coming, nor did virtually any of the prognosticators out there. Hey, not that losing to OSU is any shame! Now a 7-win team and one that very likely could beat the yucks in a few weeks. Then watch them win their bowl game for another miraculous 9-win, turnaround season that is fast becoming a Mike Riley specialty.

One more thing on Oregon State – they have become the model program that we should strive for. Think about it. They compete for at least a bowl bid every season now, and they threaten an upper-division finish when things go right. They play fast, hard, aggressive defense and they preach a strong running game with an outstanding offensive line that will kick your ass if you don’t bring it that day. They have a beautifully renovated stadium in Corvallis, which isn’t exactly Seattle if you follow my drift. They sell out their season ticket allotments, they pack the house and they make a hell of a lot of noise. They are, today, exactly where I hope our program can be, sooner rather than later. A sugar-daddy donor like Reser would sure be nice right now. Anyone know if Uncle Paul Allen has $25 million in the couch cushions to throw at the Martin Stadium remodel?? Didn’t think so. They’ve already gone to that well, and it was dry as a bone.

But I digress. Wouldn’t it be great to just hit the old control-alt-delete and start all over? No, I don’t mean this game. I don’t even mean this season. I mean for this PROGRAM. The system has slowed to a crawl and it’s highly unlikely performance is going to improve on this current session. So, just do the old, faithful, Bill Gates three-fingered salute – control-alt-delete – and reboot this sucker!

That’s right, reboot the program. Clear the cache, delete useless “temp” files, empty the recycle bin, the whole 9. Clean house. Do what now, clearly, must be done. The wins over UCLA and Stanford were, for lack of a better term, fools-gold. UCLA has folded their tents and we just got them started on packing up the car. Stanford is the least talented team in the Pac-10, and they simply weren’t up to the task. So, in the end it’s wins over Idaho, SD State, UCLA and Stanford. Give it another week or two and it’s doubtful you’ll find a bowl team in the bunch. Great. And even the ASU game was a mirage, basically the Devils first game north of Palo Alto and there was a fired-up homecoming crowd to greet them. And the 3-point loss to Cal only came with a TD with 12 seconds to go, in a game that really never was in doubt. Now we see what a disaster Cal has become, including a humiliating blowout today at the hands of a suddenly-dangerous UW team that probably can’t WAIT to face our beleaguered defense next week! And again, Cal, whoa. I hyped up the idea of Bob Gregory coming back to Pullman, but those guys were just awful today.

I talked to Brinkhater right before halftime, when it was 31-3, and the first thing I said was “has any coach ever retired at halftime?” To which he replied “there’s a first time for everything. Let’s see if he comes out of the tunnel for the 2nd half.” Ok, that didn’t happen. But it should have. In all seriousness, I declared that after witnessing Alex Brink’s complete meltdown in what is one of his worst-ever games, that they absolutely cannot continue with Brink at QB in the 2nd half. Could they really keep running him out there to fail in front of the worst crowd in the Bill Doba era? But Brinkhater set me straight. Nope, he said, they’re going to play him at least until the 4th quarter. I laughed, thinking NO WAY will that happen. So what did we see for the whole third quarter, only to watch him throw 6 INT’s? Brink. Gary Rogers didn’t even take the field until 11 mintues were left in the game and it was 52-17. Brutal.

So, now what? Maybe Doba and Sterk call a presser for Monday to announce that he’ll be stepping down after the season (no, we haven’t heard anything definitive – yet). Or maybe Doba pulls a Lloyd Carr and stays in denial until after his team lays an egg in the rivalry game next week, and, uh, the presser will be called FOR him by those above him. However it’s done, whether he retires back to Indiana, whether he’s fired in an ugly divorce, whether the payout from the contract is a big fat check or deferred until the end of the world, they have to make a change now.

At least we still have this guy. Any chance he’ll coach next week? He’ll probably be too busy coaching up his 9th-ranked hoops team. But still…at this point, why NOT?