Oregon State, of all schools, Sunday joined the parade of college-football programs sending a head coach to the soup lines – figuratively, you understand – before the season even hits mid-October. Trent Bray went 0-7 this year, and if there can be much doubt, it wasn’t a particularly pretty 0-7, so I can’t say I blame the Beavers.

But I’ve got a lot of history covering that program four and five decades ago, and it’s sort of funny to think how truly terrible it was a lot of those years, and nobody ever thought to fire a coach in mid-season. Think about a program that through 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982 never won more than a game a year.

I covered a game infamous in the state of Oregon, the 0-0 Civil War tie between the Ducks and Beavers in 1983. And afterward, a few of us stood before Joe Avezzano, the OSU coach, who campaigned to save his job off that heavy-underdog performance -- despite the fact his four-year record was 4-38-2.

Damned if he didn’t get another year. (He went 2-9 in 1984 for a five-year record of 6-47-2, and by that point, there was pretty much no point in campaigning.)

So the Beavers are going to be hiring a coach again, and I’ve got a name for them:

Jerry Neuheisel. Don’t roll your eyes.

Yes, the resume is thin, and one of the problems with Bray was, he’d never been a head coach, either. Neuheisel’s portfolio actually isn’t as profuse as was Bray’s; he became a coordinator only two weeks ago, when UCLA began authoring the season’s nuttiest turnaround, going from last rites to jumping off the gurney and popping the skeptics in the face.

The Bruins went 0-4, losing to New Mexico 35-10 as a 15-point favorite, and they fired Deshaun Foster. There was speculation in the Los Angeles Times that it looked like a team ripe to go 0-12.

Post-Foster, the Bruins hired Tim Skipper as interim head coach. He’d been on staff since July. Things happen fast these days.

Neuheisel, tight ends coach, was named offensive coordinator. Lo and behold, the Bruins scored 42 points and pulled the rug out from under Penn State, and just pantsed a favored Michigan State team on the road, 38-13.

Not that Oregon State would want an offensive mind producing teams that score 40 points a game or anything. Or somebody who apparently is so beloved by the players that they carried him off and doused him after the Penn State shocker.

Neuheisel has worked only at Texas A&M in a quality-control role, and at UCLA. As recently as the pandemic, he was a mere graduate assistant there.

Him getting a head-coaching job at 33 would exactly match his father, Rick, who was tapped at Colorado at that age before stints at Washington and UCLA – and of course, in a King County courtroom in 2005, where he prevailed over the Huskies and the NCAA after a controversial firing at the UW.

As coaching resumes go, Jerry Neuheisel’s surely is skimpy. But he’s been around a head coach all his life (and ostensibly knows some of the guard rails Rick became known for tumbling over), he’s a recruiter who knows the LA area, and now he’s having madcap success as a coordinator. Foster thought enough of him to give him the added title of assistant head coach, a role that covers a lot of the administrative duties of the head coach.

Of course, the idea of him going to Oregon State is shot-in-the-dark stuff. It’s unlikely it would all line up: Him being interested, the Beavers being interested. He’ll probably draw some post-season curiosity from other group-of-five programs. In any case, it would be a ballsy move on the part of OSU, but with its flagship program teetering in a typhoon era of college athletics, the Beavers might be advised to do something out of the box.

Meanwhile, in the interim, the OSU program is in the hands of Robb Akey, a staffer who was a popular defensive coach under Mike Price and Bill Doba at Washington State. He’s a good man and a straight shooter. He also has head-coaching experience, having been the chief guy at Idaho before and after the turn of the century. He was only 20-50, but that was perennially undermanned Idaho when it was swimming in FBS waters. He’s one of three coaches to have taken the Vandals to a bowl game.

No doubt Akey’s brass voice is already ringing through the halls of Gill Coliseum, where they answer to his ubiquitous name for everybody: “Bubba.”

He’s energetic and should breathe some life into a moribund situation. For the long term, just maybe there’s a coach’s kid in LA who could do the same.