Vikings adrift with no rudder, no destination
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
A near-abduction in downtown Portland was greeted with the urgency of a shrug Tuesday.
Nobody shrieked. Not a soul called 9-1-1. It was as if nobody noticed the dark van with Idaho plates and tinted windows idling on the curb in front of Portland State University, stalking football coach Tim Walsh.
This week, Walsh interviewed for the vacancy created by Dennis Erickson's defection at the University of Idaho. The job would pay an estimated $250,000 a year -- about twice Walsh's current salary. Idaho plays in the Western Athletic Conference, which beats the Big Sky.
But Walsh narrowly missed the job, and I'm thinking he's going to feel a little better about all that when the Vandals open next season with back-to-back games against USC and Washington State.
Still, we all sort of hope that if we went missing, someone would notice, right? Right? And Walsh was yanked into the back of a van, tied up with rope, gagged with a strip of duct tape, and carried to Idaho and back this week while his employer mostly yawned.
Same old PSU, I suppose.
All the Vikings football coach has done is go 90-68 in 14 seasons. This year, he beat Division I-A New Mexico, and in the past eight seasons, PSU has won more games in the Big Sky Conference than every other member institution except Montana.
In this paragraph you'd normally get a quote from the worried university athletic director who would wring his hands and talk about how lucky the joint is to have a coach who runs a clean asylum and makes chicken soup from chicken feathers. So yeah, Mr. or Ms. Athletic Director, exactly how difficult was it to find enough air in your lungs to breathe after you received the ransom note from Idaho?
Hello?
AD, you there?
Well, it turns out, PSU doesn't have a permanent athletic director. Tom Burman left last January to head fundraising at Wyoming, and PSU replaced him by handing former women's softball coach Teri Mariani the interim athletic director job. The message: The leadership role in athletics is the perfect place to save money.
So in this space, you're going to have to imagine the horror a permanent athletic director might have felt. And maybe it's appropriate that we're talking in imaginary terms, because what we have is an urban university living a fairy-tale existence.
T oday's question: Who are you?
I'm talking to you, PSU. One day you're talking about inspiring improvements to facilities, an increase of scholarships, higher pay for coaches and a transition to Division I-A status in athletics. And the next, you're just happy to have a cute little Division I-AA athletics program that is held together by a football coach busy working wonders.
You hire athletic directors like Burman, who was clueless with marketing but wonderful with his own agenda -- getting a better job somewhere else. The athletic department is exploring the feasibility of a 4,000-seat arena in the space currently occupied by the Stott Center and at the same time is stumped about how to get people to PGE Park to watch its football team.
The twisted part of this is that the Vikings' 2006 football team, the one that went 7-4, probably would have beaten Erickson's 2006 Idaho team. Yet your coach, who spent most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, was prepared to sell his wife on the idea of a five-year tour of beautiful Moscow as a possibility.
The guy nearly pulled it off, too.
You're lucky, but you lack vision, PSU.
You run, but only in one place. You dream big, but never bother to get out of bed. And in the end, Portland State, you end up woefully unaware that you've taken a nameless, faceless, uninspired form.
You've become a Division I-AA mannequin.
What do you see when you look in the mirror?
