Riley Turns Them Into Eager Beavers

From the corner office on the third floor, Mike Riley is the master of all he surveys through the long window to his right.

Mainly, that is Parker Stadium, a seldom-filled relic with a carpet laid in 1984 for a field.

Behind him, through another long window, he can see two grass practice fields. Between the windows is a big-screen television for viewing football videotapes and, when the kids are around, cartoons.

For a change, the football videotapes aren’t cartoons at Oregon State, where Riley is the new coach who has won more games in five weeks than the former coach did in two seasons. The Beavers are 3-2 for the first time since the Bush administration.

They last had a winning season when Nixon was in the White House and have swept the nonconference portion of their schedule for the first time since the Eisenhower years.

Riley for president?

No, but if he can get this Pacific 10 problem solved, a few votes for governor are his for the asking.

“I don’t know how good we are,” he said. “We played Stanford and Arizona State real good football games, but are we good enough to win those games? We haven’t done it yet, so we still have to prove that. . . . My biggest job at Oregon State has been getting them to feel like Pac-10 players.”

The Beavers lost to Stanford, 27-24, on a last-ditch drive by the Cardinal. And they lost to Arizona State, 13-10, when center Aaron Koch and quarterback Tim Alexander suddenly found they couldn’t exchange the ball on third- and fourth-and-one inside Sun Devil territory.

UCLA, on Saturday in the Rose Bowl, lies ahead.

Former coach Jerry Pettibone wouldn’t have recognized the players when they reported for practice on the Mondays after Stanford and Arizona State.

“After the two losses, we felt like we were supposed to win those games,” said defensive end Inoke Breckterfield, a junior and Oregon State’s defensive leader with 30 tackles, five of them sacks.

“We lost, and we were [ticked]. It’s a great feeling, and it made us ready to get to practice and watch film. To learn.

“Last year, the guys came into the games expecting to lose. . . . Now we’ve got a coach whose No. 1 goal is to win. It’s been great so far.”

Every coach has winning as his No. 1 goal, but that looked as elusive as a sunny day in Corvallis when Riley assembled his staff in the spring after signing a $1-million, five-year contract.

Riley, offensive coordinator at USC the previous four years, had landed on his feet, escaping, many say, just ahead of a posse that was looking for a scapegoat for a 6-6 Trojan season.

Riley hadn’t promised he could turn the program around right away. Oregon State had last had a winning season in 1970, when it was 6-5 under Dee Andros and his defensive coordinator, Bud Riley. Son Mike was the quarterback at state champion Corvallis High then.

Mike Riley simply said he knew the situation at Oregon State because he was coming home.

He discovered he didn’t know the situation at all.

“What we found was the scariest thing in the world,” he said. “We had all of the coaches interview the players at their positions, and when they came back and told us what they had found, we were all scared.”

The players, with low expectations, were beaten, and they were beaten down.

Coaches taking over losing programs are used to players talking about turning things around. At Oregon State, the talk was of playing out the string.

“When we got here, it was like ‘These guys don’t like it here and they don’t feel good about themselves’ and there wasn’t much illusion,” Riley says. “They were searching, trying to grab onto something that can lead them out of this deal, you know? It’s not me, but it’s something. A team, group, whatever it is wants to latch onto to feel better about themselves.”

Aspirations were replaced by reality.

“Then we all sat down and said, ‘How else would they feel?’ ” Riley said. “There’s nothing surprising about this. That’s when we decided this was a day-to-day proposition, and we started out on a day-to-day basis to approach players with the idea that they can get better.”

Day 1: Junk Pettibone’s wishbone offense.

Putting in a pro-style attack is easier when you have pro-style players, but Riley had to turn linemen from push-forward-and-open-a-hole blockers into pass protectors, and teach Alexander that a football could be thrown forward.

Alexander, a junior, has been a key.

“He has a good arm, good athletic skills, and we talked among the staff,” Riley said. “Some wanted to turn the offense over to Tyler [Tomich, recruited from Long Beach City College as a pocket-passing quarterback], but we realized that we were going to have a young and inexperienced offensive line and that Tim could help us get out of some bad plays with his athletic ability.”

Now Riley must deal with UCLA and exorcise some demons over the season’s final six games.

“We’re still kind of searching for an identity: Who are we? And how good are we? What’s going on?” Riley said.

Part of that job is done.

“It’s a lot of fun, and it’s been a real turnaround here,” Breckterfield said. “The difference is that Coach Riley has brought a winning feeling, and that’s kind of different from the atmosphere that has been here in the two years I’ve been here.”

Riley has them winning at a place where they had lost for 27 years. It has been scary. It’s still fragile, but he’s home, driving 10 minutes to work after spending four years commuting from Seal Beach to Heritage Hall.

And dealing with angry players who are no longer resigned to a Saturday fate.

NEXT FOR UCLA

Who: Oregon State

Where: Rose Bowl

When: Saturday, 3:30 p.m.

TV: Channel 9

Radio: AM 1150