If you need to talk to a college football coach, your best chance is in the middle of the summer.
By then, the heartache from the last loss has eased slightly, and the anxiety building toward the season opener still has a month before sprouting full peptic ulcers.
I caught Washington State’s Jake Dickert in that sweet spot, mid-July, when he was able to field some questions in his office at the imposing Cougar Football Complex.
It took only a few minutes of interviewing to grow impressed by his highly organized mind. Aside from numerous insights, the biggest takeaway was Dickert’s thorough and incisive response to any inquisition thrown at him.
Answers sometimes arrived supported by bullet points, with alternatives and contingencies ready to apply to various circumstances.
A nimble mind is a valuable quality in a time of such intransigence and rampant uncertainties. Who’s staying? Who’s going? Who are we going to play? And, perhaps most important, where’s the money coming from?
One question at the end of his interview triggered a response so in-depth that it deserved its own column (we’ll get to the others closer to the season). Coach Dickert, what can be done to fix college football?
He chuckled at the question, as if warning me that he had put his mind to the issue. After all, it is his life’s work.
“I think the first thing that needs to happen is the NCAA needs to break into three divisions,” Dickert said. “The football division, men’s and women’s basketball divisions, and an Olympic sports division. You have to run and operate those things with three different viewpoints. We’re all trying to fit into the same humongous pots when those are really three different ventures. However that looks, I think we need to be able to govern ourselves in our realm, as a money-making revenue sport.”
For too long, he said, the NFL has avoided sharing any revenue with college football, which serves as its minor leagues.
He sees an upper division being created “where, say, the top 40 schools create an NFL-type deal, with, maybe four 10-team regional leagues that do their own thing.”
For now, he sees Washington State fitting in the next division. “I would love to see it go back to a little more amateurism, maybe with some NIL (name, image and likeness) stuff. I think that would be really cool for Washington State to have a chance to go win a national championship at that division if you invest. I think that would be phenomenal, but there’s a lot of work to how the revenue streams get sorted out to compensate the athlete the right way.”
If Dickert were in charge, he also would align the football schedule with the college class (semester) timeline.
“I would love to see games start being played in mid-August,” he said. “There’s nothing on TV and you could play games Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday the last two weeks in August. That allows Thanksgiving weekend to be the first round of a 28-team playoff. You would do away with the conference championships — these teams have 18 teams in their leagues and they play eight; how do you get a conference champion out of that schedule?”
The August window would add great exposure value to college football, he said.
In terms of recruiting and the transfer portal, Dickert works closely with program general manager Rob Schlaeger. “He’s the most detailed, articulate and well-thought-out planner, and we do tons of this stuff together,” Dickert said.
Dickert described the current state of college sports as “Moneyball,” citing the book and movie about the Oakland A’s becoming competitive by using analytics to combat fiscal disadvantages.
“College football is now Major League Baseball — unsalary-capped,” Dickert said. “The guys with money can spend it. If you’re Oakland, and you develop Jason Giambi, you’re going to lose him to the Yankees.”
In this analogy, WSU is Oakland. “Same with us; who’s going to be here? How are you going to develop them? In the transfer portal, you have got to find the guy who has certain metrics, but he gets overlooked and comes to you.”
In the process, the importance of effective roster-building “has been exponentially increased,” he said.
Players with unlimited free agency may seem like commodities, but they can’t be treated as such.
“You have to talk to players about controlling their environment and having realistic expectations,” he said.
Dickert said that talented quarterback Cam Ward provided the prime example. And honest communication was a key.
“You’ve got a 21-year-old kid trying to do his best every Saturday, and that drastically matters to his future,” Dickert said. “What I want to do is take the pressure off. ‘Cam, I’m with you, let’s talk about it, let’s have these conversations and make sure this is not a weight on your shoulders.’ “
Ward transferred to Miami. The online website On3 listed his NIL value at just below $1 million. Life-changing money. The coach agreed that the move was the right thing for Ward to do.
Dickert took over late in the 2021 season, amid coaching chaos, a pandemic and a national athletic enterprise erasing its long-held set of rules. Through it all, his Cougars have gone 15-16.
Of course, everything about college sports could change within the next week.
But Dickert may already have a plan outlined for such things.
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