Perhaps one of the strangest college football games that I sometimes think back to is the 2004 Week 1 matchup between Oregon State and LSU in Death Valley. I was nine years old at the time.
I don’t know why this game, of all games, is wedged in my brain. But it is. I don’t even particularly remember what I was doing during the game or why the game mattered to me then or even now. But I remember it.
AndtheValleyShook has a great recap of that memorable game. Despite it being memorable to me, plenty of stuff happened during those three and a half hours that were very ordinary. Normal plays. Routine swings of momentum. Nothing that would particularly make you harken back to this game almost 20 years later, especially if you’re not a fan of either team.
There is, however, one thing that happened on that faithful September 4 night that I will never forget. That night, we saw one of the most prominent instances of #collegekickers ever, when OSU’s highly-touted kicker Alexis Serna missed three PATs in the same game. The Beavers lost the game by one point. Costly is an understatement.
Twenty years later this September, that same Oregon State football program, along with fellow dispatched running mate Washington State, will take the field on uneven footing. Much like the tattered Death Valley grass beneath Serna’s feet, both programs face an uneven and treacherous path forward after conference realignment effectively excluded them from the Power conference ranks.
The last twelve months of the Pac 12’s slow-but-fast march toward death coupled with the sport’s conference realignment tectonic plates shifting left both Pacific Northwest schools simultaneously in the limelight and in the dark at the same time.
All of this to say, it got me thinking. If most of what we know about a program has been ripped away and rebuilt, is it still the same program?
Ship of Theseus
The Ship of Theseus paradox centers around a debate from Ancient Greece and begs the question of whether or not a ship that had all of its components replaced one by one would remain the same ship.
In Greek mythology, Theseus, a mythical king and founder of the city of Athens, rescues a swatch of children from the town he founded after slaying a minotaur. After the slaying, he fled on a ship headed to Delos. In honor of his heroism, every year Athenians would celebrate the conquest by taking a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo.
Many years after the yearly pilgrimage began, philosophers asked this question: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, is it still the same ship?
Depending on who you asked, you’d likely get a different answer to the above question.
One of the most prevailing answer/non-answers came from philosopher Thomas Hobbes over a millennium later. He positioned the question like this: If Athenians stripped half of the rotted pieces from the ship and replaced them with new pieces, but then used the once-removed rotted pieces to build a new ship…which ship should be considered the original ship?
Like many philosophical questions, perhaps there is no right answer and that’s the point.
Two Programs, Tethered Together
It feels like Oregon State and Washington State are forever tethered to each other. For better or worse. Lately, it’s been much more of the latter.
Thanks to a recipe of corporate greed, selfishness, arrogance and indignity in 2023 the PAC-12 conference dissolved before our very eyes. USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington fled for greener ($$$) pastures in the Big 10, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State took cover in the neighboring Big 12 and in a publicly sheepish manner, Cal and Stanford took their big brains eastward to the ACC of all places. That left the Beavers and Cougars out in the rain and cold, both literally and figuratively.
In the blink of an eye, the conference went from the jubilation of Pac-12 After Dark to the administrators, coaches, players and fans of our two rowdy, PNW cousins being left in the dark.
As someone who attempts to take a whole-hog approach to the sport and enjoy every weird nook and cranny, it all felt sad and unnecessary. I felt that way with no real connection to either school. I can’t imagine how people in Corvallis and Pullman felt.
Fast forward to now, and both programs resemble very little to that which got them here. Administrators left. Coaches took the money and ran. High-profile players portaled. The game is the game and that’s how it goes.
In 2024, both teams will play a make-shift scheduling alliance with the neighboring Moutain West conference. They’ll also keep a few previous non-conference agreements and old rivalry games with Oregon and Washington. But for all intents and purposes, they’re out on their own, with no real conference mates or safety to fall back on.
What comes next? Your guess is as good as mine.
Traditional thinking leads me to believe that both schools will play out this scheduling alliance with the Mountain West in 2024 and pitch themselves to existing P4 conferences, only to slither back to the Mountain West for 2025 and beyond. I suppose there’s an Independent scenario for both schools, but that feels unlikely.
Both programs are G5 programs now. That’s the new reality.
On a slightly brighter note, I do think that being G5 might not be the worst thing for either program, as much as this whole process has sucked. Easy for me to say, sure, but I think they have a great blueprint for how to be a giant killer just down the road in Boise.
I’d love for both programs to adopt an ‘Us vs. the World’ mentality, ruin seasons for bigger programs and crash the College Football Playoff in due time. Maybe they could even weave in an Oregon or Crimson field in there too.
Is It the Same Ship?
In all honesty, I don’t have a true answer as to whether both the Oregon State and Washington State programs are the same “ships”. Maybe they are? But maybe they aren’t.
A lot of things have changed. But the fans, fledgling spirit and refusal to go quietly still remains, and that’s a great thing.
One of the things I failed to mention about that Oregon State-LSU game in 2004 was what happened afterward for scapegoat kicker Alexis Serna.
Despite the three extra-point misses that day, Serna went on to be the greatest kicker in Oregon State football history. In the following season, he won the Lou Groza Award as the top kicker in the country. And after a brief professional career in Canada, he made his way back to Corvallis and is currently the Director of Beyond Football for the Beavers.
Serna did a great job of building off a bad situation. He weathered the storm. He refused to relent. He turned what was likely the most grim moment in time of his career and charted a fulfilling path for himself.
Let’s hope Oregon State and Wazzu can do the same.