What if 2000 Oregon State beat Washington?

Matt Brown
Aug 22, 2017 · 17 min read

Hi friends! I wrote a book about the great What If questions in college football history. You can buy it on Amazon, Kindle, and a bunch of other places too. It covers all sorts of great questions, like failed conference realignment, Bear Bryant sticking around at Maryland, and a world where Michigan isn’t in the Big Ten, but Notre Dame, who went 4–8 in 2016, is. It’s a pretty fun book!

But not every scenario I wanted to write about, or heck, actually *did* write about, could fit in the final book.

Here’s a chapter that I wrote that didn’t make the final cut, but maybe you’ll be interested in anyway. What if 2000 Oregon State, that team that came out of nowhere to viciously dunk on Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl, had managed to beat Washington, and finish the regular season undefeated?

WHAT IF OREGON STATE BEAT WASHINGTON IN 2000?

I’m an Ohio State fan, which means I’m pretty spoiled. I expect the Buckeyes to be in the national title conversation basically every year.

If you have that attitude and you’re a fan of any American professional sports team, you are probably ridiculous, but it makes a lot more sense in college football. Ohio State enjoys a massive financial and resource advantage over most of the rest of the country. They’re the most powerful program in a state that produces a lot of very talented players, most of whom grew up as Buckeye fans. They play in either the most important, or second most important conference in the country, and they’ve been good basically every year for the past sixty years. They will probably continue to be good.

There are a few other teams in college football that can make similar claims, like Florida State, Alabama or USC. But unlike basically every other sport, deep down, most college football programs know they’re not competing for a national title before the season starts. They know they won’t have the strength of schedule. They know they don’t have the depth of talent. They don’t have the right political connections. And in the modern era of the sport, with the BCS and the College Football Playoff to bring order to the chaos, that’s become even more clear. I feel pretty confident stating that no matter when you pick up this book, even if they go undefeated, San Jose State isn’t playing for a national title. Feel free to @ me if I’m wrong, Freezing Cold Takes.

So if you’re a fan of one of those teams, you reset your expectations. If you’re a fan of say, Kansas, your goal is ‘fresh air and exercise’. If you’re a fan of a team outside of the power conferences, you’re hoping for a conference title, a rivalry win, and some fun national TV games. You don’t need to compete for the whole enchilada to enjoy the sport, after all.

But once, during the 2000 season, one of those proverbial have-not programs put together a special season. A season strong enough to lift them, if only for a year, far above what their fans could have ever hoped for. They came up just three points short of an undefeated season that would have catapulted them to a championship game.

That’s the Oregon State Beavers. And their story should give hope to all of those “little guys” out there.

Oregon State hits one prerequisite for national title contention: they play in a power conference (the Pac-12). But if we were to abolish all the conferences, throw all the teams in a hat, and form them again today, I’m not 100% sure Oregon State gets in a power league again. If you think of all the boxes that power programs check now, Oregon State misses most of them. They’re not located in a large TV market, or even a large city (Corvallis, population: 55,000). They’re not in a state that produces a lot of elite athletic talent, and they have to share that state with Oregon. They don’t have a record of football success (from 1965–1998, they didn’t make a single bowl game). They’re not even an academic research powerhouse. They’re a college baseball school. That’s a resume that screams closer to Cal State Fullerton than Cal.

Nobody was expecting the 2000 Oregon State squad to break through that mold and approach football greatness. They weren’t listed in the preseason AP Top 25. In fact, they received only a single AP vote in that poll, which would have pegged them as the preseason #49 team heading into the season.

That was fair. Oregon State was dreadful in recent memory, winning a combined 11 games from 1995–1998. Their new coach, Dennis Erickson, had brought them to respectability in his first year in 1999. The Beavers went 7–5 and made their first bowl game since 1964. But the jump between being an average team that plays in a mid-december bowl game against Hawaii, and competing against the elite of the sport, is supposed to be a pretty dang big jump.

You don’t make a jump like that without some good fortune, but luckily for the Beavers, they caught a few breaks building their roster. Their star running back, Ken Simonton, should have been bound for USC. A California native, Simonton dreamed of suiting up for the Trojans all his life, but once USC offensive coordinator Mike Riley, his lead recruiter, took the head coaching position job at Oregon State, Simonton decided to follow him (Riley left before the 2000 season to become the coach of the San Diego Chargers). Under normal circumstances, Oregon State probably doesn’t secure a back of his raw talent level, especially when they were rebuilding.

The Beavers also hit a few home runs from underrated prospects. Their quarterback, Jonathan Smith, was a former walk-on who grew into a multi-year starter. Their two talented wideouts, T.J. Houshmandzadeh and Chad Johnson, were JUCO players who had high D1 talent, but academic troubles kept either of them enrolling out of high school. Both players flourished at Oregon State, and then later had excellent careers in the NFL. Many other schools comb through the JUCO ranks each recruiting cycle, looking for the next Johnson and Houshmanzadeh, but there are lot more kids that don’t work out.

Oregon State also had a coach that knew exactly what buttons to push, and exactly how to deploy his unexpectedly deep arsenal of speed. The 2000 Oregon State team was led by Dennis Erickson. Erickson had spent the last few years coaching the Seattle Seahawks, but he was best known for winning two national titles with the Miami Hurricanes, in 1989 and 1991. Erickson would bring a similar approach to Corvalis, one that emphasized speed, self-confidence, and bringing in players from disparate backgrounds.

“Erickson brought a type of swagger and belief,” said cornerback Keith Heyward-Johnson, to ESPN. “ He preached a type of attitude that was pretty much point blank, ‘F — — them. We’re going to grind it out and be tough and we’re going to kick people’s ass.’ And that’s what they did.

So the Beavers had some talent, more than a perennial cellar-dwelling program typically would, but their season started more than slow. Oregon State needed a failed two-point conversion to escape against FCS Eastern Washington in their season opener, overcoming a sloppy offensive performance to win 21–19. The next week wasn’t much better, as they slogged through a 28–20 win at a lousy New Mexico squad. They clobbered a woeful San Diego State team the next week (35–3) to get to 3–0, but national attention was still far from Corvallis headed into their week four showdown with #7 ranked USC.

Sure, the Beavers were undefeated, and that was nice for them, but they were playing more like a team bound for the Sun Bowl than a BCS Bowl. Plus, USC had beaten Oregon State 26 times in a row. Even if the Beavers were improved, there wasn’t much reason to believe this year would be different.

But this year was different. Oregon State completely bottled up USC’s running game, holding them to under 63 yards on the ground. That forced quarterback Carson Palmer to take a few risky shots down the field, which turned into three interceptions. The Beavers then ran Simonton up, around, and right through USC, then burning them outside just enough to keep them honest. When the dust settled, Simonton ran for 234 yards and three touchdowns, and Oregon State won, 31–21.

In the end, it didn’t matter that USC was crummy that season (they finished 5–7). It didn’t matter that Smith completed just 10 of 29 passes for Oregon State. It meant that Oregon State had finally gotten the USC monkey off their back. They beat a big name program. They were good.

“To beat USC to start the Pac-10 season, we knew right then that we were good,” Simonton said to ESPN. “We didn’t have to say it any more, OK? It was on. That was the SAT. That was the entrance exam.”

Outside of their next game against Washington, Oregon State would pass the rest of their tests that season. The Beavers would wear teams down with Simonton, then blast creeping secondaries with Johnson and Houshmanzadeh deep. They’d win the turnover battle, harass opposing running games, and make just enough plays in their secondary. And the formula worked.

The Beavers won a shootout in the Rose Bowl, beating UCLA 44–38. They won a tricky road game at Cal, 38–32. They demolished Stanford and Arizona. And in one of the most anticipated Civil War battles in the rivalry’s history, they knocked out a top ten Oregon team to finish the season, 23–13.

Oregon State, yes that Oregon State, had come from nowhere to finish 11–1, their best mark in school history. They grabbed a share of the Pac-10 title for the first time since the 1960s. They were ranked in the top five in the AP Poll. They were near the very summit of the sport.

Had we lived in a world with a College Football Playoff in 2000, we might have seen Oregon State actually win a dang national title, or at least, compete for one. But that one loss to the Huskies kept them from earning a top spot in the BCS rankings. Undefeated Oklahoma would face Florida State instead, and Oregon State would get Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl as a consolation prize. It was about as stark a contrast between a college football blue-blood and the great unwashed masses as you were going to get.

And the masses didn’t just win, they destroyed Notre Dame. The Beavers bombed it deep again and again, clobbering the Irish 41–9. The score doesn’t properly demonstrate just how badly Oregon State dominated the game. The Irish ran 37 times…for only 17 yards. They managed only 155 yards, total. They wouldn’t have scored at all if not Oregon State committing a bowl record 18 penalties. The Beavers could have won by 50, and that isn’t an exaggeration. If you were somebody predisposed to disliking Notre Dame, this game was an absolute delight.

The staggering number of penalties became a bit of a story of it’s own, as TV commentator Sean McDonough stated that Oregon State’s roster strategy may have been the cause. “A big part of (Oregon State’s) turnaround is they have a lot of transfers.. and sometimes when you go that route you’re going to get players with troubled pasts. You’re going to get players who might not be great students, and sometimes you accept that stuff at the cost of improving your football program.”

Terrance Gray, a defensive back on the team, offered a different explanation. “Everyone wanted to condemn the penalties ’cause they were silly…But we were excited.”

After obliterating one of the most storied programs in all of college football, the nation wondered, just how good could this Oregon State team have been? Could they have given Oklahoma a better game than Florida State did in the national title game? Could they have actually won? Oregon…State?

Let’s take a closer look at that one loss to fully appreciate how close we came to a world where Oregon State is a national title winner in college football.

Washington won the game, 33–30. There was no shame in dropping a game to the Huskies that year, especially in Seattle. Washington also finished 11–1, and would win the Rose Bowl against Purdue that season. If not for a slip up of their own against Oregon, the Huskies would have played in the national title game themselves. Ignoring the names on the front of the jerseys for a second, this was absolutely a heavyweight fight between the two best teams in the conference. And it was basically a draw.

That wasn’t the case when the two teams played the year before. Washington stormed out to a 45–0 halftime lead, in Corvallis, no less, en route to a 47–21 blowout win. The Washington coaching staff knew they’d need to take special effort to remind their team this was a different Oregon State squad. Washington coach Rick Neuheisel would say”I thought they were unbelievable…you’re watching these guys on film and you’re going, ‘S — — … these guys are really good.”

Washington was able to do what few teams could that year, and that was run the ball, as backs Paul Arnold and Rick Alexis both went over 100 yards. They also didn’t turn the ball over once, which normally would have been enough to beat Oregon State relatively comfortably. But Jonathan Smith played a great game, throwing for 314 yards and three touchdowns, including an 80 yard bomb to Chad Johnson.

The entire game hinged on just a few fifty-fifty type moments that could have easily gone the other way.

The game was pretty back and forth, with both teams trading the lead. Early in the fourth quarter, Washington grabbed a 26–21 lead. The Beavers appeared to have set up a 4th and goal situation, but an offsides penalty gave Washington a first down, and Rich Alexis punched it from the one yard line.

But tensions were running high, and play was more than occasionally chippy. That chippiness erupted when Oregon State defensive tackle Eric Manning slugged Washington guard Chad Ward below the belt on the play. Manning was ejected, and the Beaver defense, one that had already uncharastically struggled with Washington’s rushing attack, suddenly got smaller and thinner. If Manning sticks around for the 4th quarter, it’s a different game.

Things immediately got weird. Now with advantageous field position, Washington elected to go for two, only to fumble the exchange and have it run all the way back by Oregon State. What could have been a 28–21 Washington lead was now suddenly just 26–23. Washington would attack the weakened Beaver front for another score, but Oregon State stayed in the game, thanks to an 80 yard bomb to Chad Johnson.

With the score 33–30, Oregon State got one last chance with a hair under five minutes left in the game. A long, methodical drive thanks to a heavy dose of Simonton led to the Beavers getting to scoring position with under a minute to go. Smith fired a dart to Houshmandzadeh for what appeared to be a first down, but he bobbled the ball backwards after the catch, falling just short of the marker. That set up a 2nd and 1 from the Washington 25 yard line, with 41 seconds to go.

The Beavers took their final timeout after this play, but they had plenty of options. With a first down, they’d stop the clock again, and be close enough to potentially take multiple shots at the end zone before settling for a field goal. They could also take a shot down the field, knowing they’d have a manageable third and short situation if they failed. With a stud running back, it seemed like there were no bad play calls.

But Oregon State found one anyway. They called a delayed handoff that was blown up in the backfield for a four yard loss, which not only ruined their playcalling schedule, but kept the clock running. The Beavers were forced to spike the ball to stop the clock, bringing up 4th down, and a a 46 yard field goal attempt. Ryan Cesca missed the kick wide right, and the Huskies escaped.

What if the Beavers ran power, instead of a draw? What if they took a shot down the field and put Johnson or Houshmandzadeh in a one on one situation to go get the football? What if they quickly ran a play on third down instead of spiking it? What if Cesca just made the dang field goal? What if Manning hadn’t gotten kicked out of the game? Any litany of changes would have been enough for the Beavers to spring the upset. But things just didn’t go their way.

The Pac-10 didn’t have a conference championship game back then, and Oregon State didn’t have particularly impressive wins out of conference, but an undefeated record from a power conference would have been enough to get them into the BCS National Title Game. Florida State, the BCS #2 team, lost to Miami earlier in the year. Miami had a loss to Washington. The Huskies lost to Oregon (and would have also lost to Oregon State).

Oklahoma also finished undefeated and would have earned that top spot, but if Oregon State finished undefeated, with wins over top ten Oregon and Washington squads, there is no way they aren’t playing in the national title game.

Could they have won?

ESPN asked Beaver coach Dennis Erickson. “I think by the end of the year we were as good as anybody in the country,” Erickson said. “If we had a playoff at that time and we got in it, I’m not sure we wouldn’t have won it.” During the broadcast of Oregon State’s battle with Notre Dame during the Fiesta Bowl, Ed Cunningham added “ this might be the best team in the nation.” Cunningham is a Washington grad, so that’s pretty high praise.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. Oklahoma clocked in as the #3 overall team in the country in S&P+, a balanced squad with the 3rd ranked defense and the 7th ranked offense. Oregon State wasn’t far behind, finishing 7th overall. The Beavers had the 7th highest defensive efficiency rating, and 11th on offense. So Oklahoma had the statistical upper hand, but the margin was no means massive.

If we look beyond the numbers, the case for Oregon State looks even stronger. Oklahoma’s offense was nearly unstoppable earlier in the year, but injuries to quarterback Josh Heupel (an under-the-radar QB prospect himself) slowed the Sooner attack. And while Oklahoma unquestionably had the deeper roster, the Beavers had just as many future pros. The Beavers would send 12 players to the NFL Draft over the next four seasons, like Chad Johnson, defensive end DeLawrence Grant, and linebacker Nick Barnett. Oklahoma would have a first rounder (Roy Williams), but only 11 draft picks over that same time period.

Would Oklahoma have been the favorite? Yeah, probably. But Oregon State’s defensive front would have caused a lot of problems for the Sooner running game, and the Beaver’s depth at wideout would have made keying in on Simonton a tall order for anybody in the country. It absolutely would have been competitive. And if those two teams played ten times, I bet Oregon State wins at least four. They would have had a real puncher’s chance of winning a dang national title.

Perhaps an even more interesting question is, what happens to Oregon State if they win that national title? Does it change them from being, you know, Oregon State? The next season, in 2001, Oregon State entered with high expectations, landing at #10 in the preseason AP Poll. They opened the campaign by promptly getting their asses kicked by Fresno State, 44–24. Chad Johnson and TJ Houshmanzadeh left for the NFL, along with excellent defensive end DeLawrence Grant. Their former walk-on QB, robbed of two stud NFL wideouts, played more like a walk-on (14 TDs, 10 INTs). A year removed from being on the edge of the national title conversation, Oregon State didn’t even make a bowl game.

It just goes to show how tiny the margin of error for a program competing against elite recruits without signing a bunch of elite recruits of their own. Sure, some JUCO kids can recover from personal and academic problems, adjust quickly to university life, and become All-Conference type performers, but many others get injured, struggle to acclimate, or fail to contribute. Some walk-on players become multi-year starter, but most stay on the practice squad. Some undersized quarterbacks become Drew Brees, but others become punters. To win at the level Oregon State did in 2000, you can’t afford to have anything go wrong. That just doesn’t happen very often.

For a program to overcome a lack of history, resources, or recruits, they typically need either some mega-booster to throw money at them until they can paper over their deficiencies, like Oregon or Oklahoma State, or a transcendent coach, along with a willing administration, who is willing to stick around to raise a program ceiling. Oregon State doesn’t have a Phil Knight at the moment, so any hopes of Oregon State building off their 2000 season rests on the stability of Dennis Erickson.

That…doesn’t seem like a safe bet, as Erickson was one of the most nomadic coaches in all of football. He coached virtually everywhere in the West, both in college, and the NFL, and was already starting to get buzz after just two years with Oregon State. He was reportedly a candidate for the USC opening after the 2000 season, but elected to stick with Oregon State, signing a new deal. That new contract extension didn’t stop Erickson from leaving to go back to the NFL after the 2002 season though. If Oregon State won the 2000 title, it’s hard to imagine a world where he actually sticks around in Corvallis. If anything, maybe he even leaves a year early. Some guys are lifers, and some are job hunters. Erickson wasn’t a lifer.

The most interesting question is what a Oregon State national title in 2000 might have meant for other programs. There are “Oregon States” in every power conference…schools that haven’t enjoyed historical success, or geographic proximity to talent, or deep-pocketed alumni (or bagmen) or elite facilities. You know, schools like Wake Forest, or Indiana, or Kansas, or Iowa State.

Virtually nobody expects Iowa State or Wake to ever win a national title in football. Sure, their new coach might say they intend to compete for a title at his first press conference, but nobody actually believes that. If you make bowl games on a semi-regular basis, and every once in a blue moon make a run at a conference title, fans and administrators at those schools will be thrilled.

But what if one of those schools did actually win a dang national title? Suddenly, a path to greatness exists, beyond elite recruiting. Sure, it’ll require a ton of luck, but now it is possible. Does this change the expectation level at power conference schools across the country? Do boosters decide, well heck, if Oregon State can finally do, why can’t we? Boosters from Madison to Morgantown will have to have some tough conversations.

I think that leads to coaches who might otherwise have enjoyed longer leashes, or lowered expectations, to get fired a little sooner. It may push schools that would be less likely to try and emulate Oregon State’s success to pursue JUCOs and transfer students to embrace that strategy. A few might actually get it to work. But I bet others would get burned pretty hard. It’s not an easy path towards building consistent depth, after all.

Turnaround stories like this just don’t happen. Even coach Erickson agreed. After the Fiesta Bowl, he told USA TODAY “Think where we were a couple of years ago ’til now. All of sudden playing the Fiesta Bowl and {we} become 11–1 is just kind of an unrealistic story.” But boosters and athletic administrators sell themselves on unrealistic stories all the time.

Unlike some of the other chapters in this book, the fabric of college football was not in the balance with Simonton got stuffed on that 2nd and 1. No matter what happens in the 2000 season, it’s hard to imagine a way where it turns Oregon State into a regular college football power, or even the biggest power in it’s own state. Even with a huge shiny championship trophy, the immediate future for Oregon State probably means more Las Vegas bowls than BCS Bowls.

But that doesn’t make the question any less fascinating. 2000 Oregon State celebrated the stomping the Old Guard of college football. They weren’t just beating venerated old names like UCLA, USC and Notre Dame, they’d tell you about it, they’d high step into the end zone, they’d eat that unsportsmanlike penalty that came with it, and still win. They showed just how dramatic a turnaround a team can execute in a two year cycle. They were like another version of the 1980s Miami teams, only wearing a different shade of fluorescent Orange, and in rural Oregon.

And shoot, they were really, really fun. We may never see another team quite like 2000 Oregon State again.

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Matt Brown

Written by

I write about college sports for SB Nation and Land-Grant Holy Land. I have thoughts about non-sports too. Sometimes they go here.

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