Canzano: Jake Dickert's defection from WSU should raise alarm bells
"This s—t has got to change."
Jake Dickert is leaving Washington State to become the head football coach at Wake Forest. Nobody should be shocked, which is only to say that most of us understand that a person can only take so much.
Dickert was abandoned by the athletic director who hired him, repeatedly ditched by his coordinators, and just watched his star quarterback, John Mateer, and 19 other teammates scramble into the transfer portal, causing a bottleneck.
What?
You had Dickert down as a forever guy in Pullman?
WSU’s 41-year-old coach publicly said he wanted to work for 10 more years and then retire. I didn’t have his “dream job” penciled in as a modest address on Tobacco Road, but these are the times — and college football is broken.
NIL, the transfer portal, realignment, an invasion of street agents, an absence of guidelines, no consequence for rule breakers — the shocking thing is that Dickert didn’t throw in the keys last December when his other star quarterback, Cam Ward, announced he was leaving.
Ward head-faked like he was declaring for the NFL Draft last spring, then landed at Miami, where he cashed a seven-figure NIL check and became a Heisman finalist.
I cautioned WSU multiple times in print over the last few months that it needed to lock Dickert down with a lifetime contract. Yes, even amid his team’s late-season swoon. He was a growing flight risk, in part because he cared so much and the world around him was wobbling.
The Cougars should have thrown their best contract pitch at Dickert while they still had the chance. There were multiple discussions during the season between Dickert’s agent and WSU Athletic Director Anne McCoy, per sources. But insiders told me there were concerns about pushback from the university trustees, who had recently scolded the athletic department for overspending and slashed $11 million from the budget.
It takes money to win football games, folks.
It’s like Arizona State coach Kenny Dillingham said this season: “Pay the man his money.”
ASU’s athletic department, incidentally, spent $121 million on all sports in the last fiscal year. That ranks second-to-last among the 10 public schools that made the College Football Playoff and No. 33 in the country. Give Dillingham a ‘high-five’ for beating the odds.
Ohio State spent $72 million on football alone in the same fiscal year. Washington State’s entire annual athletic department budget is $74 million. Boise State, which spent “only” $24 million on football, is proof winning can be accomplished on the cheap with a good culture and an unusually loyal 2,000-yard running back. But we need to get real — the financial gap is widening with every season, and the playing field is tilted in a way that flies in the face of the Sherman Antitrust Act.