In late August, when Ray Rice was the only story the sports world cared about, there was talk about the Oregon State Beavers being a nine win team in the coming season.
Maybe a ten win team, if they got a few bounces.
Sean Mannion was back, and the Beavs had a chance to make a rare quick start to the season under Mike Riley. Only two of OSU’s first six games figured to be competitive, and 5-1 looked like a reasonable first-half split.
But it didn’t take long for that optimism to hit the skids as the Beavers stumbled through their early schedule and proceeded to completely fall apart.
Last Saturday was a new low: The Beavers lost at home to a Washington State team that was 2-7 and had lost their star quarterback to a devastating ACL tear the week before.
The final score was 39-32, but that flattered the Beavers. Washington State was the better team, and they thoroughly deserved to win.
At the moment, Oregon State has one of the ten worst rushing offenses in the country, only ten passing touchdowns in nine games – and all this under the kind of new offensive coordinator that OSU fans had been pining for for years.
The defense isn’t any better than the offense, and that’s how you get a team that has one conference win against pitiful Colorado – and that with the help of officiating that was controversial to the point that Buffs coach Mike McIntyre spent his post-game chasing down and screaming expletives at the referee.
The week before the Washington State loss, Oregon State was dismantled by Cal, a team that went without a conference win last year.
It’s been an ugly year. At this point, you would expect this column to pivot to Mike Riley and his future. Riley has – again – come under pressure, not just for the losing, but the sense that this Oregon State program is stagnant at best, and regressing at worse.
No one in the media has called for Riley to be fired, in part, surely, because Riley is one of the most legitimately likable men in college football. He’s genuine, he works hard, and he treats people well.
Mike Riley is the Jimmy Carter of college coaching.
And Riley has had a great career, but it’s hard not to feel like he’s coming to a tipping point.
It’s hard to sell Riley’s prototypical 9-4 season as the best Oregon State can do, when the landscape of college football has changed to the point that Mississippi State is the number one team in the country.
Baylor is a national powerhouse. Duke is on their way to a second straight ACC title game. TCU is going to make the college football playoff out of the Big XII.
Money has leveled the college football playing field. There are still haves and have nots, but the bridge to competing for a national championship can be very quickly traveled.
Just look at the Ducks.
Because everyone has a certain amount of money, television games, and exposure these days, coaching is even more important than ever before.
So while Oregon State certainly has a tough road to the top 25 every that mandates they navigate a tough location to recruit to, subpar facilities, and no tangible reputation of weight, there’s no reason the Beavers can’t shoot for the stars.
It wasn’t that long ago that OSU almost broke through in college football. Two years in a row, they just needed to win the Civil War over Oregon to reach the Rose Bowl.
Two years in a row, once in Corvallis and once in Eugene, the Ducks won. Now, Oregon is a national powerhouse, and the Beavers are sitting on four wins.
As a matter of fact, those two losses by Oregon State when they were playing for a Pac-10 title and a trip to Pasadena were the first two consecutive losses by the Beavers in the Civil War since 1996 and 1997.
That’s how thin the margins can be in college football. In that 2008 game, there was nothing on the line for the Ducks. But they came into Reser Stadium in Mike Bellotti’s last rivalry game and hung 65 on the Beavers.
The next year, if Jeremiah Masoli has any sense in his body and realizes that it’s absolute madness to try to truck a defender for a crucial fourth down conversion, maybe Oregon State gets the ball back, beats Chip Kelly, and college football doesn’t look the same today.
But common sense was never a strong suit of Masoli’s (remember the stolen laptop?), and the Ducks converted and won 37-33.
Oregon State is having a miserable year, but let’s not act like they can’t get to the college football promise land. Let’s not act like Riley can’t get there – he has been one game away twice.
It just takes one year in college football, one great year. So although Oregon State is far away from that year now, fortunes can turn around quickly.
Of course Riley needs his team to play better. Attendance is lagging, and Oregon State is going to have problems drumming up the money and support among boosters is must have to keep up in the college football arms race.
Oregon State fans are tired of hearing the media defend Riley, and they’re definitely tired of losing. They want results, and one the media talking points – that the Beavers shouldn’t expect anything great year to year – is hot air.
Oregon State should have ambition. Recent history says that the Beavers can be a national contender. They shouldn’t lose sight of that.
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