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Hollywood, Calif.
Even as Oregon State went winless in Pac-12 play last season, coach Gary Andersen liked how "The Drive" portrayed him and the Beaver football program.
His mother's reviews of the Pac-12 Networks programming were not totally favorable, however. In her early 90s, Barbara Andersen maintains high expectations for her son. "My mom scolded me a little bit sometimes for my language," Andersen confessed Friday, during his Pac-12 Media Days appearance.
If some elements of Andersen's addresses to his team required bleeping to protect an audience that included his mother in Salt Lake City, nothing could mask the on-field performance of the Beavers. Oregon State finished 2-10 overall and 0-9 in the conference in Andersen's first season, the launch point for a rebuilding job that seems even more monumental than the one he undertook at Utah State in 2009.
"They're a long way away," said Pac-12 Networks analyst Glenn Parker, who's hardly the only observer saying so.
And then there's BYU defensive coordinator Ilaisa Tuiaki. Having spent a year coaching OSU's defensive line, he's convinced a turnaround is coming, based on the staff's recruiting success. "I hate to put the pressure on them," Tuiaki said, "but I wouldn't be surprised in the next two years if they were playing for the Pac-12 championship, I really wouldn't. I wouldn't be surprised if they took the North."
Stanford, Oregon, Washington and the rest of the world? They would be shocked if that happened by 2017, if ever. Going back to the middle of former coach Mike Riley's second-to-last season of 2013, the Beavers have lost 21 of 23 conference games.
Andersen believes he can apply his Utah State blueprint to Oregon State and succeed eventually, though. With former Aggie quarterback Darell Garretson taking the OSU job this season and several coaches who helped transform USU's program working for him, Andersen is committed to the project.
"You know me good enough, I love to be involved in a big-boy fight," he said. "Our coaches love that. Our kids are learning to love that. … This is a big-time league, and it's a big-time environment, and there's a big gap to close down, a fight every day to do it, but I have great kids. I'm in the environment that I love to be in."
Andersen cites "a lot of similarities" in Corvallis to his work in Logan. The difference? The Pac-12 is not losing USC and Stanford to another league. The overlooked element in Andersen's taking USU from the 3-9 team he inherited to an 11-2 record in his fourth season of 2012 was the splintering of the Western Athletic Conference, accelerating the Aggies' rise.
That's not to diminish his impact in Logan, just the reality that climbing in the Pac-12 is another matter. OSU was overwhelmed up front in 2015, and that has to change. "Maybe the most important part for us is our physicality," Andersen said. "There's about 100 other things I could mention to you … but if we can't [improve] that, nothing else matters."
Yet as the Beavers shared "The Drive" documentary with Utah every week last season, they made a good impression for a losing team. Andersen's study of the season included those presentations. He liked the way he came across on the screen and admired his players' perseverance.
"We didn't hide from our deficiencies and we didn't hide from the struggles and the problems that we were going through," he said. "I was very proud of the way our kids carried themselves, watching it again in the offseason. It was obvious … that they didn't cave in, they didn't quit, they didn't walk away. They kept on battling all the way to the end."
Andersen handled a rough season as well as "any great man could," said OSU receiver Victor Bolden, crediting him with remaining consistent.
What the Beaver need now is some inconsistency, mixing in some Pac-12 wins amid all of those losses.
Twitter: @tribkurt —
From winless to …
Since the Pac-10/12 adopted a nine-game conference schedule in 2006, five teams have gone 0-9. Here's how the previous four fared the next season:
Team Year Next year
Washington 2008 4-5
Washington State 2009 1-8
California 2013 3-6
Colorado 2014 1-8
Oregon State 2015 TBD