COACHES: MIKE PRICE

Mike Price, coach of the Washington State Cougars, is a different breed of cat.

Looking at him, all gray hair and eyeglasses at 51, you don’t see the jokester, the innovator, the coach who shrugs off a lot of college football’s no-nos--the guy who thinks a little bit differently than the rest of us.

He’s a media charmer who isn’t used to having much media to charm, the son of a coach from the same town, Everett, Wash., that spawned Seattle Seahawk Coach Dennis Erickson and Washington Coach Jim Lambright.

He’s a man who actually has love in his heart for Pullman, Wash., for gosh sake, so you have to either listen to him or dismiss him as somebody you simply wouldn’t understand.

But Price has Washington State in the Rose Bowl for the first time in 67 years, and an accomplishment that rare deserves examining.

He has done it with a wide-open offense--one that has so many new wrinkles that he says, “we look like a Shar-pei dog.”

More than anything, he has done it on the strength of the arm of a marvelous quarterback. Ryan Leaf has carried the Cougars here.

But Price also has made champions of a band of misfits.

Many of his players, USC and UCLA couldn’t--or wouldn’t--take.

Price takes chances.

Or does he give them?

“He’s always been that way,” said his son, Aaron, a graduate assistant with the Cougars. “When you’re in an underdog situation all your career, the way he has been at Weber State and Washington State, you’ve got to rely sometimes on picking a guy somebody else might not pick.

“It’s about character. When you talk to people, you get to know their character and say, ‘This is a good guy.’ There are hard times, and they learned from them.”

There is no more obvious or oft-cited gamble than Michael Black, the running back from Dorsey High and West L.A. College who served time in two youth facilities after being convicted of auto theft and armed robbery before he was 18.

This season, Black rushed for 1,157 yards and is on his way to graduating after two trouble-free years in Pullman.

Price gave Black an opportunity to change his life, which he did.

He also gave him an opportunity to put a dark smudge on the reputation of Washington State--which he did not.

Before giving Black a scholarship, Price made some phone calls, then asked Black to tell the whole story, leaving nothing out. And then, based on little more than that, he accepted him--and the accompanying risk.

“We’re not the FBI,” Price said. “I talk to people, but if I felt I needed to hire the FBI or a private investigator, I wouldn’t recruit somebody.”

Black didn’t let him down.

“For me, he wasn’t taking a chance because I knew where I had been and knew I wasn’t going back,” Black said.

Washington State is the school of the second chance--and sometimes the only chance.

“Washington State has had a bad rap the last couple of years for taking guys normally other programs wouldn’t take,” offensive lineman Jason McEndoo said.

“Coach Price’s style is, he believes in the second chance. So many guys on our team, he gave a second chance. There are some that work out. Some don’t. We have had players that we had to put behind us and move on. But just because it didn’t work out before doesn’t mean you don’t try again.

“He’s going to help out until you step on his foot.”

Price has been burned before, but that doesn’t keep him away from the fire. To succeed at Washington State requires a different approach, for better and for worse.

“We don’t go through the Parade All-American top 100 and pick,” Price said.

Price has made starters of former walk-ons such as receiver Shawn Tims, center Lee Harrison, guard Cory Withrow and linebacker Todd Nelson.

Sometimes he recruits a player, then promptly changes his position.

None of the Cougars’ “Fab Five” receivers played that position in high school. None of the members of an underrated defensive line was a defensive lineman in high school.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Price said. “It’s not who you recruit, it’s what you do with them. You pick the right guy who is willing to move from offense to defense.”

Opportunistic, that’s what Price is.

He took in Love Jefferson, a tight end from Garden Grove, after Pacific dropped football.

Transfers are no problem. Price himself attended three schools--Everett Junior College, Washington State and Puget Sound.

The Cougars also accept Proposition 48 players--players who are academically ineligible as freshmen and aren’t granted admission at some other schools.

Leon Bender, a defensive tackle from Santee, Calif., was one of them.

After sitting out his first year, Bender showed promise his sophomore year, then lost his academic eligibility and ended up at a local branch of Walla Walla Junior College, finally returning to play two seasons for the Cougars and be named first-team All-Pacific-10 and third-team All-American.

“He gives everybody a second chance, even a third chance because he believes in us,” Bender said. “That’s one of his ideologies. He recruited us as players, and he believes when the chips are down, we’ll get the job done.

“Last year, we were 5-6 and before that we were 3-8. We’re the same people. We believe in each other. He instilled those values in us, and we still believe, each and every game.”

One of Price’s more unusual qualities is that he actually enjoys spending time with the players. Price likes to stop by a hotel room and watch the players play computer games, though he admits, “I’m terrible.”

The open door goes the other way too.

“It doesn’t matter what time, what day or whatever happened to you,” said McEndoo, who endured a terrible loss in 1996, when his wife, Michelle, was killed in an accident with teammate Ryan McShane at the wheel as the three returned from a wedding.

“He’s been there for me, through my personal tragedy,” McEndoo said. “I’ll always be indebted to him. It’s a great testament to see the way the players rally around him. I think the nation sees that now too.”

Price won the Eddie Robinson coach-of-the-year award this season, and is a finalist for a handful of others, the highest praise of a career that began as a graduate assistant to Jim Sweeney at Washington State in 1969.

In the 1970s, as a Cougar assistant, Price helped guide quarterback Jack Thompson’s prolific career.

He started an eight-season stint as Weber State’s coach in 1981, guiding the school to a 10-3 record in 1987 before returning to Washington State in ’89. Before this year, his best season was 1992, when future No. 1 NFL draft pick Drew Bledsoe led the Cougars to a 9-3 record.

Now that he has finally made it to Pasadena, Price is the relaxed Rose Bowl coach, the one with public practices at the Coliseum--a stark contrast to Michigan.

“It’s just a different philosophy,” said Price, whose players did not have a curfew at their Santa Monica hotel their first week in town.

That was another of those risks Price takes, but he reports no problems.

Game week, however, is a different matter--”We’re tightening down,” Price said.

As he paints it, the Cougars are the team from hard times, going up against the rich and the powerful.

“This is David and Goliath,” Price said. “They have all the money, all the prestige. We want to go from underdog to wonderdog. . . .

“I really think this could be America’s team. Everybody in Michigan is hoping Michigan wins, but not in the rest of America. Don’t people always want to pull for the underdog?”

Sure--if as does Mike Price, they understand that when you take the long odds, sometimes you win big and sometimes you lose.