It wasn’t really so long ago, was it, that Washington State fired football coach Paul Wulff, causing him to respond bitterly, “I believe the innocence of Washington State has been lost today. We don’t eat our own.”

Quaint, huh?

Wulff said this at season’s end in 2011. He had just gone 9-40 over four years.

Four years? By today’s standards of cashiering failed football coaches, four years seems more like four decades.

Sunday, UCLA whacked Deshaun Foster, who could tell Wulff, a former WSU center, a somber tale about being an alum cast to the trash heap. Foster got all of 15 games to prove his chops.

The same day, Virginia Tech rid itself of fourth-year coach Brent Pry.

Folks, the calendar hadn’t even hit mid-September yet.

It wasn’t so long ago, 20 years or so back, that it was unusual to see a college coach jettisoned before a season ended. Then the grim reaper began his work earlier, nudging into early November in some cases. Three years ago, Paul Chryst got fired at Wisconsin on October 2, the Badgers deciding that his 67-26 record there just wasn’t cutting it.

We live in impatient – some would say irrational – times.

Monday, Oregonian columnist Bill Oram called for the firing of second-year coach Trent Bray, which is a pretty startling commentary on where we are in 2025. Bray went 5-7 last year and is 0-3 this season, which makes him 5-10 at a school that from 1975 to 1992, won no more than two games 13 times. Oram detailed some of the Beavers’ fundamental failings in ’25, cited Bray’s seeming lack of presidential bearing and the F-bomb he dropped in a halftime interview and concluded OSU needs to stop the bleeding.

“The days of patiently building programs over years are over,” Oram wrote. “With rosters turning over every single year, it is a win-now business.”

Oram has watched the Beavers far more than I, and it’s quite possible OSU football is at an inevitable dead end with Bray as head coach. Where I would take issue with his premise about patience is that Oregon State, along with Washington State, has just been through a brutal, unthinkable couple of years, orphaned by the other 10 members of the Pac-12 and left to figure it out.

A year ago, Jake Dickert, then the WSU football coach, told me the Cougars were down seven positions in football support staff. The athletic budget, hardly one of college football’s most wasteful, had to be trimmed from $87 million to $74 million.

So Dickert left for Wake Forest and the Cougars replaced him with Jimmy Rogers of South Dakota State. In ’25, the Cougars have been unsteady, winning uneasily against Idaho, throttling San Diego State, and somehow getting obliterated 59-10 at North Texas.

Since Saturday the message boards have been unyielding. The Cougars were badly coached. They had too many FCS transfers who couldn’t play. The play-calling was terrible. Rogers is in over his head.

People have harked back to the Wulff regime, to which I would say, wait a minute. However they got there, the 2025 Cougars are 2-1, and I watched a 2009 Wulff team go an entire season never leading a game in regulation time.

Bigger picture, you get the sense that some fans just assume you’re supposed to be decent, and to hell with the extraneous details. To those folks, I would remind them that Rogers is working with 70-odd new faces this season – probably a little less reloading than they’re doing at, say, Georgia or LSU.

It’s distinctly possible that, two years after Oregon and Washington made that seminal pivot to the Big Ten, the full forces of the circumstances have come crashing down on OSU and WSU. The transfer portal has beckoned, and players are going where the money is.

Think about what’s changed in the Apple Cup dynamic. A year after the Cougars denied Washington at the goal-line to win the 2024 game, they lost a head coach, a quarterback in John Mateer who’s now front-and-center in the Heisman reckoning at Oklahoma, and assorted other talent. Washington has kept its key players and solidified where it was lacking. The Huskies are a three-touchdown favorite in the Apple Cup Saturday, and for WSU, it’s not likely to be pretty.

Meanwhile, OSU was able to pay for quarterback Maalik Murphy, and you can say that no matter the hardships, Bray can’t be excused if the Beavers aren’t fundamentally sound.

I don’t know if Bray can coach, and I don’t know if Jimmy Rogers is in over his head. What I do know is that as chaotic a time as this is in college football, it’s doubly dizzying for the indigents in the food chain. If ever there were a time for a little forbearance, this might be it.