‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ as the saying goes, and it took more than just one business day for Oregon State Athletic Director Scott Barnes to pull off one of the more heartwarming, table-turning okie-dokes that the sprawling orange and black kingdom of Beaver Nation could imagine. He needed two.
“I wanted to tell you that we have been on a journey for a couple of days,” Barnes said to the Oregon State football team, who had been asked by the athletic department to gather at Valley Football Center in Corvallis on Tuesday evening. “A national search, interviewing seven candidates. Our best guy of that bunch without question, your new leader, Coach Trent Bray!”
The team went nuts for the defensive coordinator turned head coach. Especially, as you could expect, from the defensive players. Star players like John McCartan, Andrew Chatfield Jr, and Akili Arnold were the first to hug OSU’s new head man and dap him up in the front row of the team meeting room. Stud cornerbacks Ryan Cooper Jr and Jaden Robinson tweeted out their enthusiasm for the news.
Allegiance to the defensive coordinator turned head coach extended to the other side of the ball as well. OSU’s generational talent at running back Damien Martinez, who was almost a campaign manager for Bray on social media over the last 48 hours, was one of the first to hug Bray after his opening address. Martinez’s backfield mate Isaiah Newell shared a story to his Instagram account proclaiming “We got our guy” with particular emphasis on the words “we” and “our.”
Trent Bray, a 41-year-old Oregon State alum, has yet to officially serve as head coach for a single game, but he’s representative of a complete 180-degree turn from the doom and gloom state plaguing Beaver Nation since the news of former head coach Jonathan Smith leaving his alma mater for a salary bump at a 4-8 program in a region he’s never recruited became official on Saturday morning.
Never has one of the most famous memes in the history of the Internet more appropriately encapsulated the human condition than this famous meme has of Beaver Nation from Saturday through Tuesday:
A fanbase that felt dead and gone on Saturday, now feels recharged and reborn on Tuesday. The emotions I wrote about for the Monday Morning Tail Slap for this very week, now feel like a thing of the past.
There are still challenges ahead, to be sure. Oregon State’s conference affiliation is just as precarious as it was the moment it became clear that 10 conference partners were abandoning OSU and Washington State and leaving them for dead. Prosperity over the next few years of Oregon State athletics remains a very difficult needle to thread even if it was Paul “Bear” Bryant running the football team. Even without the exodus of Smith the team was set to lose a number of contributing seniors to the NFL, but the promotion of Bray to head coach during an expedited national search qualifies as a win, and goddamnit is this a program that could use a win right now.
Whether or not Bray is qualified to run his own program will play out over the ensuing months and years, but his retention at this point is a massive victory for a program and a community that fancies itself a championship contender, despite none of the remaining “Power Four” conferences giving it the time of day.
Some major wins: At the time of this writing, no OSU player has given an indication that they’re entering the transfer portal. Bray has a chance to keep the bones of this squad together, retain essential staff, and pick up the recruiting trail right where Smith left off.
Given the circumstances, I don’t know how else this could have ended up better for OSU. In spite of the circumstances, Smith leaving to make way for Bray, could even be a net positive for OSU.
We won’t know for sure until the next months and years unfold, but as it stands now, mere days after Beaver fans thought they had been dealt a death sentence on top of a death sentence, all feels pretty well.
Corvallis, Oregon always has and always will be the Paris of the Pacific Northwest, but that doesn’t mean there’s not enough room for it to be known as the Bray Area as well.
Welcome to the Bray Area, Beaver Fam. Stay awhile and rest easy knowing we got our guy.
We got our guy. Let’s go Bray-zy! Let’s get nuts!
Get your ‘Bray Area’ merch now!!!