Oregon State Beavers 2025

Far too often in recent years, Oregon State has suffered the consequences of actions beyond its immediate control.
So, when the Beavers have the rare opportunity to take matters into their own hands, to fight for their preservation and dignity, they simply cannot hesitate.
That is why Trent Bray must be fired.
Today.
Or as quickly as athletic director Scott Barnes can get the university’s lawyers on the phone.
This is no longer a feel-good story. It is not just a season that is spiraling into irrelevance, it is the entire football program.
A loss at No. 6 Oregon on Saturday will be the Beavers 10th in their last 11 games. Difficult opponents await each of the next two weeks, as well.
Bray, a celebrated son of this program, has neither the acumen nor the disposition to be a head coach. His ill-considered expletive on national television was merely a symbol of how bad things have gotten.
Even bad teams have basic competencies that Bray’s Beavers have found to be insurmountable.
Long snapping?
Avoiding false starts?
Tackling?
The Beavers have seemed unprepared for every moment this season, which is a direct reflection of a coach who is also not ready.
It is a comedy of errors that only cartoonishly reinforces what a rotten hand the Beavers were left when they, along with Washington State, were left for dead by the rest of the Pac-12.
A leader better equipped for the moment could spare Oregon State continued embarrassment.
The cash-strapped OSU athletic department will need to pay Bray $1.2 million for each of the three years remaining on his contract, but that financial impact can be offset when he earns another job, which I’m certain he quickly will.
Bray was a celebrated position coach with the Beavers and a rockstar defensive coordinator. That is the job he should be doing.
Oregon State’s head coach can’t simply be the top football mind within the Valley Football Center. He has to also be the CEO, which requires a personal touch that Bray does not possess. There’s a reason Paul Allen was never the chief executive of Microsoft.
It’s no fun to call for a coach to be fired, nor is it lightly considered.
The deal you make with the devil to do my job is that you occasionally need to take a stand that will affect someone’s livelihood. Even with that, being the sports columnist for your hometown newspaper is the best gig in the world, something akin, I’d imagine, to being the head football coach at your alma mater.
Does Bray like being a head coach?
I asked him that during his weekly news conference on Monday.
“Next question,” he said.
How’s that for enthusiasm?
Bray had to be persuaded to take this job when Jonathan Smith ditched the Beavers in 2023. Despite his shortcomings, Bray’s willingness to accept the weighty responsibility at that time remains admirable. He should be remembered and celebrated for his loyalty.
In that very specific moment, he seemed like the right guy for the job of holding the roster together when the transfer portal opened.
But that backfired. Most of the team left anyway.
Since then he has proven he is not the right person for the job in this moment either.
He insisted on Monday that he is.
Why?

 

“I think for the same reasons I took it over,” he said. “Love this place, I love this program. I think we’ve got good coaches, we’ve got good players, we’ve got to continue to get better and continue to get the best out of these guys.”
If after two full recruiting periods, and a 15-game sample size, your best defense for keeping your job is the same platitudes you employed on day one, then you are admitting you have not grown in the job.
Simply, the program has gotten worse under Bray — seemingly by the week.
Even more damning, the fanbase seems to have tuned out as well. Attendance at the first two home games was abysmal. How will it be when Bray’s team is 0-4? Or 0-6?
Bray had an opportunity to try to shake things up after the Week 2 loss to Fresno State. To show that he is a serious operator for a serious task. But his unwillingness make the obvious change, reassigning or firing special teams coordinator Jamie Christian, demonstrated that he does not have the constitution to make difficult decisions when necessary.
Barnes cannot fall victim to the same complacency.
The days of patiently building programs over years are over. With rosters turning over every single year, it is a win-now business.
Look no further than the juxtaposition of the two programs on the field at the Rose Bowl on Saturday. With former Idaho coach Jason Eck at the helm, New Mexico (New Mexico!) blew out UCLA, leading to second-year coach DeShaun Foster’s dismissal as the Bruins head coach.
Credit to UCLA for acknowledging the obvious and shoving Foster, an alum of his program just like Bray is, out the door.
When a coach is in over his head, as Foster was, and Bray is, you must not allow him to sink further. Because he is pulling everything down with him.
There is no good time to fire a coach in the middle of a season, I grant you. And if Barnes were going to dismiss Bray before the Oregon game, the time to do it would have been on Sunday, before game prep for the short trip to Eugene had begun.
But the Beavers have already lost this erstwhile rivalry game. The 35-point spread is the widest in the series’ 129-year history.
Even a win against the Ducks wouldn’t absolve Bray. It would be a profound fluke much more than evidence of anything being fixed.
The season hinges on what happens on Sept. 26 against Houston, a Friday night game that could drop the Beavers to 0-5.
By firing Bray now, Barnes would give an interim coach — my first call is to Mike Riley and I settle for former Idaho coach Robb Akey, a special assistant to Bray, when Riley declines — 10 days to build toward that critical moment, rather than a short week to prepare if Barnes were to drop the hammer after the inevitable loss to the Ducks.
Believe it or not, there is still something to salvage out of this season. No FBS team has ever lost its first four games and managed to win six games and get bowl eligible.
The Beavers conceivably could. Their four September opponents are a collective 15-1 to start the year. Their opponents in October and November? A more digestible 9-9.
This Oregon State roster is too good for the team to be this bad.
It is not the special teams. It is not the tackling. It is not penalties. It is not a lack of effort.
It is all of the above. And only one person can claim responsibility every one of the team’s shortcomings.
The greatest sports columnist who ever lived, Jim Murray, cautioned that “nothing is ever so bad it can’t be made worse by firing the head coach.”
Things are bad at Oregon State.
In the Beavers’ case, the only thing that could make it worse would be not firing the head coach.
-- Bill Oram is the sports columnist at The Oregonian/OregonLive

 

This newspaper won’t let me print what Trent Bray said about Oregon State’s latest debacle | Bill Oram

CORVALLIS — The Beavers needed somebody to snap, but not like Trent Bray snapped.
His assessment of Oregon State’s special teams in the first half?
Unprintable in this newspaper. And, by the way, unsayable on The CW.
Bray said it anyway.
Paging the FCC...
(Acknowledging the existence of the Federal Communications Commission is as close as we will come to spelling out the actual term Bray used. We have standards to uphold.)
The fact is, the second-year coach may have been staggeringly unprofessional, but he was not wrong. The special teams were an (expletive) joke. But so, too, is a head coach who cannot keep his cool during a walk-off interview at halftime and get into the locker room to give his team the lecture it has earned.
How can Bray possibly ask his team to maintain its composure when he cannot?
How can he expect Oregon State’s players to believe in his vision when he hung them out to dry in what was only a five-point game?
How can any of us expect the Beavers to avoid a meltdown when, in fact, it is behavior modeled after their head coach?
“I talk a certain way,” Bray said in his postgame news conference. “And sometimes in the heat of the moment, I talk like I was if I was in talking to a friend. So that’s where I’ve got to grow as a head coach and understand on national TV I can’t say that.”
The Beavers slip-slided their way through a second humiliating loss as home favorites, this time against Fresno State, 36-27.
You never want the sight of your long snapper on the sideline with his hand wrapped to become the story of the game.
But as the result of Dylan Black’s absence, there were two bad snaps on point after tries, one groundball snap that the punter salvaged and another, better snap, that the same punter dropped, leading to a touchdown.
All before halftime.
In total, there were six botched kick attempts. Two bad snaps on PATs, three unsuccessful punts, and with 4:18 left in the fourth quarter a field goal try that saw the snap roll to the toe of Caleb Ojeda, who managed to get it off the ground but not all the way to the crossbar.
Special teams were but one of the problems. The Beavers couldn’t tackle. They committed one costly penalty after the next. It was a comedy of errors — or, as Bray said in one of his printable comments, “a calamity of self-inflicted wounds.”
Even after all of that, they managed to nudge ahead with 79 seconds left in the game.
It wasn’t the fault of special teams that Fresno State quarterback E.J. Warner was able to scramble twice for a total of 27 yards and put the Bulldogs in position to kick the go-ahead field goal.
These two weeks may be most unprepared a Beavers team has looked to open a season since 2001, when the nationally hyped Beavers, fresh off the Fiesta Bowl win, were clocked by Fresno State, 44-24.
And amid the drops amid another bomb, it was the bomb that Bray dropped in his interview with former Oregon State defensive coordinator Nigel Burton on The CW that was the biggest embarrassment. It may go down as the lasting image of his tortured tenure as the Beavers head coach.

Remember when every Beavers game being on national TV was sold as a good thing? That didn’t account for Bray’s braying.
On Saturday 100 percent of American households could tune in to the programming home of wholesome classics like “Gilmore Girls” and “One Tree Hill” and see the Beavers head coach deliver a monologue fit for an HBO comedy special.
In a text message, OSU athletic director Scott Barnes said he and Bray had discussed the coach’s use of one of George Carlin’s seven words and that Bray “agrees that that it is unacceptable and has apologized to Beaver Nation, our university and others. He fell short in his obligation to represent OSU with class.”
Barnes said he is “completely confident” it won’t happen again, but I’m not sure why.
Bray’s tenure is starting to feel like a version of football Groundhog Day.
Bray needs his mouth washed out with soap, but I’m increasingly starting to wonder if this coaching staff won’t need to be cleaned out sooner than later, too.
I’m not such a prude ninny that I can’t handle a little swearing. I love invective as much as the next person, maybe even as much as Bray.
Trent, I feel you. I talk the same “certain way” you do. Many of us do!
But there are certain rules of decorum that should be upheld, particularly at a school that is desperate for positive publicity.
And on that front, Bray failed miserably on Saturday.
You think Mike Riley never thought his team’s performance in the first half deserved an F-bomb?
He saved it for the locker room.
The reality is that Bray will need to get a handle on his emotions if he is going to remain the most visible representative of the state’s largest educational institution — a question that is very much open-ended after an 0-2 start to the season following last year’s 5-7 stinker.
The former defensive coordinator’s firebrand intensity can be an asset, if only he can harness it.
Three years ago, well before Barnes persuaded him to take the head job and stop the bleeding caused by Jonathan Smith’s overnight getaway act, Bray had insisted that he harbored no aspirations of becoming a head coach.
And now you have to wonder if everyone should have listened a little more closely when he suggested he was at his best as a coordinator.
Being a head coach is not simply about being a football mastermind. It is about being an ambassador of the school and being consistent with its values.
I keep going back to one thing Barnes said: “... fell short in his obligation to represent OSU with class.”
Man, after everything Oregon State has been through over the last two years, how is some base level professionalism too much to ask? Can the coach be profound instead of profane?
You can forgive, to an extent, some losing and you can forgive, to an extent, some poor judgment. But after Saturday, the Beavers are being asked to tolerate both.
And it is not going to get immediately better.
Their next two outings are road games against top-25 opponents, including the Sept. 20 showdown against an Oregon team that just made Oklahoma State look like a Division III patsy.
The Beavers are on the road to oh-and-four.
They’re already oh-and-four letter words.
-- Bill Oram is the sports columnist at The Oregonian/OregonLive

 

While the Beavers still have that big bucket of Pac-12 money, they need to fire Bray.

 

Fuck