Last Friday evening, I was scarcely into processing Gonzaga’s 94-59 basketball victory over Kentucky – the Wildcats’ worst loss in 18 seasons – when some other news dropped: Jimmy Rogers was leaving his post as Washington State’s football coach to move to Iowa State.

The juxtaposition was jarring. One event was engineered by the fact a coach long ago saw something promising in Gonzaga, something worth seeing it through, and stayed to do it. The other happened just 80 miles south, where in the same calendar year, Jimmy Rogers said, “I’m about as loyal as it gets” at his introductory press conference and then bookended that by turning tail to Ames, Iowa.

I can’t say what motivated Mark Few to stay hitched to a small Jesuit school when he could have gone virtually anywhere, but it worked for him, famously. Meanwhile, the Cougars are off on another coaching search, and for the greybeards among us, there’s PTSD originating half a century ago, when, after Jim Sweeney departed in 1975, Jackie Sherrill bolted in 1976 and Warren Powers split after the 1977 season. And I distinctly remember the next coach, Jim Walden, meeting the Pac-10 Skywriters the following August with a sign strung around his neck that said, “Yes, I will honor my contract.”

Now the Cougars are off on another coaching search, even as some WSU fans are still smarting from Jake Dickert’s messy exit to Wake Forest a year ago. When they find that new guy, it probably wouldn’t be realistic that he suggests a national championship is a possibility, as Few has chased up the road, but would a few years’ service and some stability for a listing athletic program be too much to ask?

A coach with wanderlust is never a good thing, but the Cougars have been buffeted mercilessly in recent years – by the Pac-12 implosion, by a change in presidents, by athletic director Pat Chun’s soulless hejira to Washington. And now, because of new president Betsy Cantwell’s recent firing of Anne McCoy, it’s a coaching search without an AD. Someday, the Cougars will be through all this, but for now, it seems so much like a quest for mere equilibrium.

As for Rogers’ successor, the name getting the headlines is Rick Neuheisel, coach at three Pac-12 venues and late of television and radio, where he has excelled. I think the idea is intriguing, particularly paired with the promise of his son Jerry, but some serious vetting needs to take place. It’s easily forgotten that Neuheisel flopped at his alma mater, UCLA, in his last coaching job, going 13-23 in league games over four years, and that in his last regular-season game, the Bruins lost 50-0 to USC.

Neuheisel has been open about his interest in the WSU job, publicly. It’s probably happened, but I can’t remember a coach campaigning for a job and actually getting it.

When the Cougars do land their next head football coach, it would be wise to recall what developed with Walden, after that placard promise 47 years ago to stick it out with WSU. Indeed, he was there nine seasons, most since the beloved Babe Hollingbery. He had a modest 44-52-4 record, but he generated respect among the fandom and is remembered fondly today. And having combed through decades of Apple Cup history for my book “Too Good to Be Through,” I can tell you that the five years of the Washington rivalry he oversaw in the first half of the Eighties was the most sizzling stretch in the 125 years of the series.

So there’s reason for hope for the Cougars. Their facilities will be top-shelf in the reformed Pac-12. Yes, the NIL world will be a challenge, so the Cougars must lean on what’s worked in the past. There, it isn’t so much about trying to out-recruit Washington or Oregon or Boise State for a prospect, but identifying and projecting. Like finding the great Rueben Mayes in Saskatchewan, 400 miles from the Canadian border. Or sleuthing out Will Derting, a guy in north-central Washington who didn’t have recruiting stars, or his family a phone, before he became All-Pac-10.

WSU has been a place with a can-do spirit, where Mike Price could take a team to two Rose Bowls.

The new guy needs to know all that. The hope is, he stays long enough to find out.