Monday Morning Tail Slap: Getting Dumped on The Ride of the Rohirrim
Thoughts on Oregon State's bookends of heartbreak
“Well, it is great to be home.”
The first words of Jonathan Smith’s introductory press conference didn’t dance around any eggshells. They didn’t fall into the abyss of cliches that is “coach speak” and they weren’t filled with empty promises or any guarantees of championship splendor. They made it clear that this man approached his decision thoughtfully, made the best decision for himself and his family, and that once he did he was all in.
“Now I’m sitting here in front of you guys at my dream job, in my dream town, at my dream school.”
These quotes are not from Smith’s introductory conference at Michigan State, his new place of employment. That event is scheduled for Tuesday. These are of course the words Smith said in November of 2017 when he was introduced as the next head football coach at his alma mater Oregon State University. His school. A school that had fallen to the deepest depths of the American college football food chain and didn’t appear to have any way to climb out. Smith wasn’t the only candidate considered for the gig. There were others, some of whom didn’t even pick up the phone.
It’s hard to blame anyone who passed on the job. The 2017 Beavers went 1-11, the “1” a 35-32 win against FCS Portland State where the Beavs snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by way of a missed PSU field goal in the waning seconds. Things got so bad that Smith’s predecessor, Gary Andersen, not only quit in the middle of the season, but also gave Oregon State millions of dollars worth of his salary back to the school just to not have to coach the team anymore. When asked what a coach needed to be successful at Oregon State on his way out the door, Andersen didn’t mince words.
“It doesn’t matter who they hire.”
It doesn’t matter who they hire. If there was anything that endeared Smith to Beaver Nation, beyond being the quarterback of the best team in school history, it was that he met that widely-held sentiment with his trademark and Jim Halpert-esque smirk and then just quietly pulled off one of the most impressive rebuilds in the history of college football.
Smith didn’t instantly turn the Beavers into contenders, but the gradual improvement was undeniable. When revolutionary moves like the Transfer Portal and Name, Image, and Likeness deals sent shockwaves through college football, Smith and the Beavs never flinched. Both the Portal and NIL looked like behemoths that would make an already unfair playing field even steeper for schools like Oregon State, but that reality never set in. Smith’s recruiting class ratings improved year over year, and no other coach in the country had a better retention rate when it came to keeping talented players from entering the Portal. An Oregon State team working its way to the Top 15 and Top 10 of the College Football Playoff rankings was an impossible dream in 2017. A few years was all Smith needed to make that the expectation.
When Smith’s playing career came to an end, he went into coaching immediately. Anyone who ever coached him or played with him knew he would be running a program of his own from the sidelines some day. After stops at Idaho, Montana, and Boise State, Smith served as the offensive coordinator at the University of Washington. Smith helped the Huskies reach the College Football Playoff for the first time in 2016 and his name popped up here and there in the college football coaching carousel soon after.
Smith to Oregon State wasn’t seen nationally as a ‘homerun hire,’ naturally it’s Oregon State so we can question if the national media really saw it at all, but it was hailed locally as the type of competent decision that can lead a team back into the light after years in the darkness. I first heard the news from a friend of mine who attended the University of Washington and watched every game while he was on staff.
He texted me to see if I had seen the news yet and added, “It’s a perfect hire because if it works, it works forever. If he really is the guy then he might never leave.”
Even before Oregon State found itself in the middle of college football realignment hell, it’s a naive thought to think any coach, no matter how connected, no matter how exalted, could never leave. Vince Lombardi coached in Washington after his years in Green Bay, and even Mike Krzyzewski came close to leaving his cushy job at Duke to coach the Lakers before opting to spend the rest of his career in Durham (good decision, Coach K). However, even before Smith turned things around, it wasn’t hard for fans to look into their own personal crystal balls and see old number nine as a Corvallis mainstay, cranking out 8-10 wins a year with an annual/semi-annual big upset to boot. Oregon State might be an impossible place to win a national championship, but if any head coach in the world can do it, it’s the guy who very much almost did it as a quarterback.
Whether he ever admits it or not, Smith signed up to be that kind of savior. I don’t particularly support the practice of making statues of humans as a sign of achievement (because statues are weird and creepy), but the path for him having a statue in the shadow of Reser Stadium one day was pretty damn clear. Smith signed up for those expectations and he certainly signed up to guide the program through the treacherous waters of those first few years at the helm. However, he did not sign up to steer the ship if it didn’t have a harbor, and when the Beavs got left out of realignment, Smith then left the Beavs for the first opportunity that came a knocking.
Reader, no matter what happens from here on out, that part of all of this will never not hurt. A wound of a proud fan base has been opened, and one of our very own is dumping salt into it.
Smith has only been the head coach of the Michigan State Spartans for a few hours, and he’s yet to say something as disparaging about Oregon State as Gary Andersen did, but as this very article was being written, he arrived in East Lansing, MI and said he knew this was coming “for a long time.”
How long, Jonathan?
A week? A month? A year? Longer?
USC and UCLA announced they were leaving the Pac 12 for the Big 10 on June 30, 2022, which put all this in motion. Did you know then? Did you know all season when you publicly preached for every member of the program to ignore the realignment noise and “100% locked in”?
Were you 100% locked in this whole year? Were you really? Asking for me and several thousand of my closest friends in every corner of Beaver Nation.
The timing of the breakup could not be worse. Oregon State is in the most precarious position it’s ever been in in the history of its athletic department. Athletic Director Scott Barnes faces a unique and gargantuan challenge to not only find a leader to right the ship, but then also, find the ship’s aforementioned missing harbor.
The wake of any breakup leaves a plethora of questions and feelings floating to the surface (note the absolutely correct use of the word ‘plethora’ there for the freaking win, baby!!! (I don’t know what you do, reader, but I also know that boss you hate says ‘plethora’ in pointless meetings a lot and always uses it incorrectly; if it’s not used with a negative connotation, it’s not correct, example: ‘Jonathan Smith fed the media a plethora of bullshit before he left Oregon State for Michigan State’))
Smith led Beaver Nation on like that ex who broke up with you at the end of the summer even though they knew they had already made up their minds about dumping you on the last day of school. How else do you interpret “long time” from the quote above? How else do you interpret his farewell template notes app goodbye post on Twitter? The dude has spent more than a decade of his life in the Oregon State football program, which I thank him for, but can’t forgive him that after all that time he Googled ‘Tips for Saying Goodbye 101’ on his way out the door to his private jet to East Lansing.
That’s another part of this, East Lansing, Michigan. Home of Michigan State University. A school that has made no shortage of headlines in the last few years.
Jordan Ritter Conn penned one of the best pieces of sports writing in 2016 when Kevin Durant left the Oklahoma City Thunder for the Golden State Warriors. The piece is titled ‘Thunder Road’ and was published by The Ringer on December 8, 2016 and focuses primarily on the many nuances of the breakup between Durant and his longtime co-star Russell Westrbook. It’s a long piece, but I encourage you to devour every word because it is an absolute master class in storytelling. Even now, years after both players have played for several different teams, I still find it especially poignant and I adore every word of it.
A primary theme of the piece on Durant leaving Oklahoma City, which I feel strongly in this current case of Smith leaving Corvallis; is that it’s not about that he left, or even how he left (though I do have my issues with the “how” of all of this), it’s where he went.
Michigan State University.
A school and a team that admittedly has been much more prevalent in the NCAA’s “revenue sports” than Oregon State has. Certainly in football, there’s no denying that. The Spartans made the 2015 College Football Playoff under longtime head coach Mark Dantonio, and won the 2021 Peach Bowl under Mel Tucker. In terms of recent college football seasons that truly popped, Michigan State has Oregon State beat, but Smith isn’t leaving for any of Michigan State’s recent teams.
He’s leaving for Michigan State in 2023. He’s seen as a good fit for Michigan State, due to his experience at a program cast as a “little brother” in the shadow of a much more well-funded in-state rival. That’s a fair point. Michigan will be a tough mountain for Smith to climb. The only thing Michigan State seems to do better than their own in-state big brother these days is collecting scandals on top of scandals.
Michigan State’s football team this season went 4-8. I don’t blame the players, who played their asses off in the wake of Mel Tucker’s asinine scandal, but the Spartans were not a good football team. They were not even a mediocre football team. Of their four wins, one came against a team that ended this season with a winning record with their Week Two win over the FCS Richmond Spiders, who finished 9-3 in the CAA Colonial.
The one common opponent MSU and OSU shared in 2023, was the University of Washington. We know the Beav’s tilt with the then No. 5 ranked Huskies ended in a heartbreaking 22-20 defeat. The Spartans lost to the Dawgs, in East Lansing, 41-7 and didn’t find the endzone until the 5:53 mark of the 4th quarter.
Plaxico Burress is not walking through that door, Jonathan.
University of Oregon’s stadium operations pulled off a fairly well-played troll job by playing the Michigan State game on the scoreboard at Autzen Stadium when the Beavers were going through warmups on Friday night amid the swirling rumors that Smith had already exchanged his orange and black for green and white.
The Spartans lost to Penn State 42-0. I wonder if Smith was paying any attention. I’m sure he was since he’s already on record stating that Michigan State has been the apple of his eye for “a long time.”
It needs to be mentioned, Michigan State has more money than Oregon State does. That’s a fact and I’ll be curious to see what the final number of Smith’s new contract is. It’s sure to be high, as Smith, like Andersen, also owes multiple millions back to the school for terminating his contract. MSU also has a conference to play in. The Big Ten. My hometown conference. The conference largely responsible for the destruction of Oregon State’s conference. A conference with Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, and adding Washington, Oregon, USC, and UCLA. Is there a path for Michigan State to compete for Big Ten championships again? Can they make it back to the College Football Playoff?
I would love to hear Smith’s honest answer to those two questions. I would also love to hear from the University’s President and Provost on those two massively important athletic matters, as well as how they conducted the process of finding their school’s next head coach, but we can’t do that right now because Michigan State currently has neither. I’ll be curious to see who Smith ends up working for. I’m sure he’s curious too. The school does have an Athletic Director, Alan Haller, who hired Smith a few months after he fired Tucker for sexually harassing a sexual harassment advocate hired by the school, and only one month after firing a third-party vendor who displayed imagery of Adolf Hitler on the scoreboard during pregame programming at Spartan Stadium.
No disrespect to Spartan fans, I know it’s a proud community, but is this really the best Smith can do? I understand leaving Corvallis for more money and conference stability, but this feels like settling in a major way. The two Big Ten-bound programs in his hometown of Los Angeles both have coaches sitting on seats with varying degrees of warmth. Why not churn out another 8-10 win season in Corvallis and be a major player for one or both of the jobs at USC and UCLA when they inevitably open?
I don’t know. I’m being petty here, but pettiness is a natural stage of grief in the early stages after a breakup.
I don’t suppose Smith will touch on any of those points at his presser tomorrow. I doubt he ever gives Beaver Nation much more closure than the five copied and pasted sentences he provided in his Notes app farewell.
Have you ever ran into an ex months after they broke it off with you at the neighborhood watering hole? Because Smith will be in the neighborhood again sooner rather than later. His Spartans will play on the very field where he coached his last game at OSU to take on the Oregon Ducks on October 5, 2024. We of course don’t know who the Beavs will be playing that day, but I wouldn’t mind if the Ducks—in a small display of regional harmony—played the OSU game on the scoreboard for Smith to enjoy while his new team warms up.
I don’t suppose Smith will take a moment during that inevitable 52-6 loss to turn his gaze to the North and wonder how things are going just 44 miles up the road in a nearby land where he used to be king.
Speaking of 2024, when the pettiness stage runs its course, it does appear Beaver Nation will still have much to be excited about when they’re ready to move on from Smith. While a handful of essential coaches have already committed to join Smith in East Lansing, sources have communicated to Belligerent Beavs that beloved defensive coordinator Trent Bray will be hired as the new head coach.
Bray is young, but he instantly turned the Beaver defense into an elite unit when he was promoted to the full-time DC role midway through the 2021 season. He’s an OSU alum (though that connection feels understandably fractured right now) and is well-versed in the challenges in building a winner in Corvallis even when there is a conference to call home. If Bray is indeed Barnes’s choice, it should limit any type of mass exodus from the players, especially on the defensive side of the ball, and could retain several more coaches from OSU’s celebrated staff. Several players and alums have already taken to Twitter to support Bray’s candidacy for the job, especially star running back Damien Martinez, who has already said he has no plans to play for anyone other than Oregon State next season.
Speculation is rampant right now, but an announcement could come from Barnes at any moment. Until then all Beaver Nation can do is wait.
Oregon State’s future may be uncertain, the hearts of the fanbase may be broken, and the seemingly unconquerable doom of realignment is still at the city gates. It’s impossibly clear Oregon State won’t get through this saga unscathed, but it will get through it. What does Théoden say at The Ride of the Rohirrim?
Forth and fear no darkness!
Arise! Arise riders of Théoden!
Spears shall be shaken!
Shields shall be splintered!
A sword day! A red day!
Ere the sun rises!
It’s time to ride to Gondor, Scott Barnes. Ride now!
Ride now.