30 Days Ago, Cristobal and Lake Were Coaching Head to Head
Thirty days ago amid the pouring-down rain and stiff wind buffeting Husky Stadium like a ship a sea, Mario Cristobal and Jimmy Lake stood on opposite sidelines, coaching Oregon and Washington in the annual football hate-fest.
One shove, too many losses and a lot of Miami money later, now look where we're at.
New commissioner George Kliavkoff promised last summer he was going to remake Pac-12 football in a big way. He couldn't have envision anything quite like this.
With Monday's announcement that Cristobal will leave Oregon for Miami, the conference has undergone coaching changes at six of the dozen schools over the past 23 months.
The new guys: Kalen DeBoer at Washington, Lincoln Riley at USC, Jake Dickert at Washington State and TBA at Oregon.
The fairly new guys still feeling their way around the league: Jedd Fisch, who just wrapped up his first season at Arizona and Karl Dorrell, who recently finished his second year at Colorado.
Which leaves the Pac-12 with holdover coaches in the recently contract-extended Jonathan Smith at Oregon State and Herm Edwards at Arizona State, plus Utah's Rose Bowl-bound Kyle Whittingham, Stanford's still deeply respected David Shaw, California's comfortable-like-an-old-pair-of-socks Justin Wilcox and UCLA's anything-goes Chip Kelly.
Did someone just wish that Kelly would consider returning to Eugene?
While all of these changes lead to a fresh start and fan-base hope, rapid-fire coaching changes still tend to stress a program's continuity, not to mention turn recruiting upside down,
It must be tough being Sir Mells and Ben Roberts right now.
They're high school defensive linemen who are Oregon commits and former UW pledges.
Mells, in fact, can't seem to get comfortable with his coaching contacts for very long at all.
He committed to the Huskies a year ago when Pete Kwiatkowski was defensive coordinator.
He decommitted after Kwiatkowski moved to Texas for the same job.
Now what's he going to do?
Roberts likewise would be facing a coaching change no matter where he had turned to pursue his college ball, having committed at different times to both UW and Oregon.
Welcome to Power 5 football, where there's now such an urgency to succeed and realign and renegotiate rich TV contracts that nothing stays the same for long anywhere except in the SEC.
Note that Brian Kelly no longer coaches at Notre Dame and has resurfaced at LSU, and Riley couldn't fathom becoming another Bob Stoops at Oklahoma and spending 18 seasons in Norman.
Where 18-year coaches used to be the norm in Seattle, DeBoer inherits a talented Husky roster that only needed to be managed better, maybe opens with Jake Haener at quarterback and hopefully lasts longer than Jimmy Lake's 13 games.
Utah is going to its first Rose Bowl and, with the momentum Whittingham is building in Salt Lake City these day, it probably won't be the Utes' last.
USC will need to restock the talent, but Riley shouldn't take long to show improvement in the league's flagship program and have the Trojans pursuing New Year's Day bowl games again.
Then there are the Cougars.
They've been surprisingly resilient in swapping out coaches in-season, from Nick Rolovich to Dickert. If this it what it takes to win the Apple Cup by four touchdowns, they'll make that change every year.
So Cristobal is off to Miami, where he played and coached the Hurricanes. Wonder if he might consider taking Lake with him as defensive coordinator? Thirty days ago, they were together.
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