Mike Riley, Ambassador

1. Let’s be honest here. Being in a city (Eugene is not one, btw) is not the reason most kids go where they do if this point is to taken seriously. Being close to home is what drives them. And the larger population centers have more prospects, leading to more kids who grow up as fans, wanting to be hometown heroes.

2. Not much to say here. Our fan base propels this perception as do the fans of our younger sister school. One of the ways our fans do it is by making up BS reasons why Corvallis and OSU “naturally” suck.

3. Stereotypes… meh. Rankings are in the 60’s and 70’s and trending upward. We’re about middle of the pack (or Pac). But there are really no outliers below us beside Nikegon, who is trending nowhere on this front. Now, if you want to talk about rankings porn like USN&WR or Forbes and how that might shape stereotypes, have at it. But anyone who takes those seriously will have a hard time convincing me they ever graduated from high school, let alone college.

4. Other schools have NFL players, and some of them play at a high level on that highest of levels. Some of these players were no-stars and two stars also. This one bugs me. We’re a Pac program. Of course we’re going to get some NFL talent through here. Every Pac school does. And I highly dislike the notion that only OSU can foster kids into adulthood as if we’re the only ones who do. That’s pretty much what most schools in the country do. I’ll bash on the Ducks with the best of them. But I’m never going to say that the best of their best don’t line up with ours in terms of being quality adults and citizens of the world.

5. Yes… one of the most educated towns in the world and an incubator for entrepreneurship. Diversity is about 21%, and foreign enrollment is about 11% at the largest school in our state, total enrollment topping 30k this fall (with about 5k coming from the Bend campus and a very very highly rated online program). Diversity does somewhat reflect Oregon’s demographics since about 70% of our enrollment is made up of in-state students. But that also speaks to the school’s integrity while remaining true to its mission.

6. Riley has a good rep. Players come back. But prospects who would be better players never come in the first place, thus never get the chance to be some of those players who come back. This is a mindset adopted by the coach himself. It’s the old, “If I don’t try, I won’t fail,” attitude. I think it was you yourself who said above that most players come for the coach, which makes this list a little strange in and of itself. But you (if it was you) are dead on right about that one. It’s what we’ve been saying for years. The coach gets the players he wants. The players he wants are from the pond in which he chooses to fish.

7. This may or may not be true. Ed Ray has proven that boosters and corporate benefactors will step up to the plate if given a clear vision… and they are asked. Do we have a clear vision for our athletic department as a whole? Some programs (like hoops, baseball, gymnastics and T&F) have gone out and done the legwork on their own. So this one seems a bit disingenuous. The lack of an overall vision, lack of creativity from the man who heads the department, lack of effort and timely risk to follow through on plans created before that man came to power… all of it speaks to management, not boosters.

8. Fancier schmancier. Other than an incomplete west side and visitors needing to use Gill locker rooms (really… boo hoo), what is needed? I know what’s needed. They say a house is just a house. It’s the people who live in it that make it a home.

Corvallis is hard to recruit to for those who think Corvallis is hard to recruit to. That’s the bottom line. In fact, there is no other line. There may be individual analogies, but they may also be predicated on the person or people introducing them to Corvallis and OSU. When you start a sale with, “I know our town/program/weather/facilities/school suck/s, but…,” you kinda put yourself behind the curve immediately.

And the media is saying that Riley is the only person who can do what he’s doing. They’ve been saying it for years. Every time it comes up, there is no serious discussion. It’s either, “Who would they get?” or, “Pony up the cash for a buy-out.” Never mind the buy-out is borne of the same lack of vision in the first place and shouldn’t be something any fan or booster should be told to be responsible for.

This discussion is a little closer to the truth. But it’s still lacking. The truth is about product and performance. I had more fun watching Kragthorpe’s teams while I was in school because they always came out and gave it up on the field. But they were in a much more seriously disadvantaged position in terms of talent. And the final scores often reflected that. When I see the same, consistent poor play carried out by unprepared talent who are very much better than the OSU players of the 115 ship era… year after year after year… what am I supposed to think?