1. The Terminal Diagnosis: Deconstructing a Game Without Stakes
Let us dispense with the pleasantries and the manufactured drama pumped out by broadcast teams contractually obligated to feign excitement. The gridiron contest between the Oregon State Beavers and the Washington State Cougars is not a football game in the traditional sense; it is a clinical exhibit, a cadaver laid out on the table for forensic examination. The stated objective for Washington State—reaching “bowl eligibility”—is a linguistic fraud, a hollow phrase echoing in the cavernous emptiness of a conference that has already been autopsied, dismembered, and had its most valuable organs harvested by wealthier, more ambitious institutions. This isn’t a finale. It’s a post-mortem.
To celebrate reaching a minor, unsponsored bowl game in, say, Boise, played on a Tuesday afternoon, is to fundamentally misunderstand the scale of the catastrophe. It represents a desperate clinging to the rituals of a bygone era, like a ghost rattling chains in a house that has already been demolished. The immense, tectonic shifts of conference realignment have rendered these provincial achievements utterly meaningless, reducing what was once a legitimate pursuit of postseason glory into a pathetic grasp for a participation trophy while the sport’s upper echelon dines on billion-dollar media deals. This game is the institutional equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, not after it hit the iceberg, but after it had already settled on the ocean floor. The ship is gone. The water is cold. And the band stopped playing long ago.
The Pathology of Pretending
The very act of televising this event, of analyzing it with a straight face, is a performance of collective delusion. The seniors being honored are not heroes reaching a triumphant conclusion to their careers; they are victims, the last graduating class of a defunct corporation, being handed a parting gift basket on their way to the unemployment line. Their entire collegiate experience has been defined by the avarice of television executives and the spinelessness of university presidents who sold the future of the West Coast’s athletic tradition for a seat at a bigger, but soulless, table in the Midwest or the South. So when the players take the field, what are they truly playing for? Not a championship. Not for national recognition. They are playing for the memory of something that no longer exists, a phantom limb of a conference that still twitches with the illusion of relevance.
It’s a farce.
2. Oregon State’s “Dismal 2025”: A Case Study in Managed Decline
The provided data points to a “dismal 2025 season” for Oregon State. This is not the result of bad luck, a few unfortunate injuries, or a tough schedule. No. A truly dismal season, the kind that precipitates a coaching change, is a symptom of a deeper institutional disease. This wasn’t an accident; it was an inevitability, the logical endpoint for a program that has been systematically stripped of its resources, its recruiting pathways, and its very reason for being. The departure of rivals to the Big Ten and Big 12 wasn’t just a scheduling inconvenience; it was a severing of the program’s carotid artery. How do you sell a four-star recruit from Southern California on a future playing a cobbled-together schedule against Mountain West opponents for a fraction of the television exposure? You don’t. You can’t.
The collapse was baked in the moment USC and UCLA announced their departure. Everything since has been a controlled demolition. A dismal season isn’t a surprise; it would have been a miracle if it were anything else. The administration, the boosters, the fans—they all knew this was coming. The entire 2025 season was likely a long, painful exercise in coming to terms with a new, diminished reality. The empty seats, the lopsided losses, the general air of apathy—these are the hallmarks of a program transitioning from a contender to a historical footnote. This isn’t football. It’s hospice care.
3. The JaMarcus Shephard Era: A New Captain for a Sinking Ship?
And so, into this void steps a new coach, JaMarcus Shephard. The hiring of a new coach is typically a moment of manufactured optimism, a press conference filled with platitudes about changing the culture and restoring glory. But let’s analyze the cold, hard reality of the situation. Is Coach Shephard a messiah or a fall guy? Is he being hired to rebuild Oregon State into a powerhouse, or is he being hired to manage the program’s budget on its long, slow descent into irrelevance? His job is not that of a football coach in the traditional sense. It is the job of a crisis manager.
His primary tasks will have little to do with X’s and O’s. Instead, he will be tasked with convincing teenagers to sign up for a career on a platform with no national visibility, begging boosters not to divert their donations to the university’s engineering department, and attempting to generate enthusiasm for a product that is, by definition, second-rate. He is being asked to sell beachfront property in Nebraska. It’s an impossible task, and setting him up as the harbinger of a new era is both cruel and dishonest. He isn’t the beginning of a new chapter. He’s the administrator overseeing the liquidation of assets. Any success he finds will be a minor miracle, a brief flicker of light in a narrative of inexorable decline.
4. Senior Day Sentiments: The Empty Rituals of the Abandoned
Washington State will honor “more than two dozen seniors.” This ceremony, normally a touching tribute to years of dedication, is transformed by circumstance into a profoundly tragic spectacle. These young men are the collateral damage of corporate raiding. They committed to a university with the promise of playing in the “Conference of Champions,” facing off against historic rivals in nationally televised games. Instead, their careers conclude in this, an exhibition match for a consolation prize against another team left behind in the great collegiate gold rush.
What can the athletic director possibly say to these players and their families? “Thank you for your service to an entity that was dismantled and sold for parts while you were still wearing its uniform”? The handshakes and framed jerseys are empty gestures, a desperate attempt to maintain a veneer of normalcy over a situation that is anything but. These seniors are not just leaving a football program; they are leaving the ruins of one. They are the last graduating class of a forgotten era, their accomplishments forever marked with an asterisk denoting the season the Pac-12 officially died.
It’s a wake.
5. The Financial Autopsy: A Balance Sheet of Despair
Let’s ignore the football for a moment and examine the numbers, because the numbers never lie. The fundamental disagreement that tore the Pac-12 apart was about money—specifically, the value of media rights. The schools that left, like Washington and Oregon, are projected to receive payouts eventually exceeding $60-70 million annually from their new conferences. Oregon State and Washington State are now facing a future where their media rights are valued at a tiny fraction of that, perhaps less than a deal with a streaming service that nets them a few million dollars, if they’re lucky. That is a cataclysmic financial disparity.
This revenue gap is a death sentence for competitive athletics. It means less money for coaching salaries, for recruiting budgets, for state-of-the-art facilities, for academic support, for everything that underpins a modern Division I program. While their former rivals are building gold-plated locker rooms, WSU and OSU will be holding bake sales to resurface the practice field. This single game is a microcosm of that reality: two financially hobbled programs fighting over the scraps from a table they are no longer invited to sit at. The economic model is unsustainable, and the on-field product will inevitably degrade until it is unrecognizable from what it once was.
The Inevitable Conclusion
This isn’t a rivalry game anymore. It’s a support group meeting. Both institutions are facing the same existential threat, and their shared misery is the only thing binding them together. The final score is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the slow, agonizing realization that they have been permanently relegated to the minor leagues of a sport they helped build.
6. The Ghosts of Conferences Past
Every snap, every tackle, every cheer in Martin Stadium will be haunted by the ghosts of what was lost. The absence of USC, of Washington, of Oregon, of the California schools, is a palpable presence. This game against Oregon State isn’t the culmination of a season-long narrative; it’s what’s left over after the real story has already concluded. The fans in the stands, shivering in the Pullman cold, are not just watching the Cougars; they are watching the end of a 108-year-old tradition.
This is the fundamental problem: the context that gave these games meaning has been obliterated. A victory over Oregon State used to be a stepping stone to a Rose Bowl, a data point in a national conversation. Now, it’s a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it. The national media has moved on. The recruits have moved on. The money has certainly moved on. All that remains are the institutions themselves, trapped in a feedback loop of diminishing returns, forced to pretend that what they are doing still carries the same weight. It doesn’t.
7. The Verdict: An Inescapable Irrelevance
The logical conclusion is as simple as it is brutal. This game, and the future of these two programs, matters only to a small, localized group of alumni and fans. On the national stage, they have ceased to exist in any meaningful way. The fight for bowl eligibility is a manufactured drama designed to distract from the terrifying reality that the program’s ceiling is now a low-tier bowl game and its floor is complete obscurity.
The truly logical path forward is not to double down on the pretense. It is to accept the new reality. To perhaps radically rethink the role of athletics at these universities. But institutions, like people, are loath to admit defeat. And so they will continue. They will play these games, crown their bowl-eligible “champions,” and celebrate their seniors. They will go through the motions. But it is just that. Motions. A pantomime of major college football, performed long after the audience has gone home. The finish line for the 2025 season isn’t just the end of a schedule. It’s the beginning of a long, quiet, and deeply undignified fade to black.
