The challenges — and opportunities — that Oregon State and Washington State face in building winners
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Kyle Bonagura
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Kyle Bonagura
ESPN Staff Writer
- Covers the Pac-12.
- Joined ESPN in 2014.
- Attended Washington State University.
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Adam Rittenberg
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Adam Rittenberg
ESPN Senior Writer
- College football reporter.
- Joined ESPN.com in 2008.
- Graduate of Northwestern University.
ON THE NIGHT of Nov. 18, the national spotlight shined on Corvallis, Oregon.
Oregon State proudly showcased its 11th-ranked team and its $162 million renovated stadium, packed with fans clad in black and orange and undeterred, as Pacific Northwesterners are, by the steady rain that fell. The Beavers pushed then-No. 5 Washington to the brink, shutting out the Huskies’ powerful offense in the second half, before falling 22-20.
Two weeks later, Oregon State found itself under a different set of clouds. Jonathan Smith, who had helped the Beavers rise to national prominence as a quarterback and then a coach, had left for Michigan State, a move officially consummated hours after the Beavers’ 31-7 loss to rival Oregon, but in the works long before then. Key players had entered the transfer portal, including starting quarterback DJ Uiagalelei, gifted backup Aidan Chiles and leading tackler Easton Mascarenas-Arnold. Oregon State didn’t have a coach or a 2024 schedule, and its future as one of two left-behinds in the dissolving Pac-12 seemed hazy at best.
“Once Jonathan left, there’s an anxiety that ensued about, ‘Oh my goodness, what’s next? What’s going to happen?'” athletic director Scott Barnes said.
There was a similar panic on the Palouse. Although Washington State didn’t go through a coaching change, it also had lost its starting quarterback, Cameron Ward, and other notable players to the portal. Questions loomed about WSU’s schedule, roster and resources as it teamed with OSU in a legal battle for control of the Pac-12.
Shoulder to shoulder, Oregon State and Washington State are entering uncharted territory for major college football programs. They do so with young, defensive-minded coaches — Oregon State promoted popular defensive coordinator Trent Bray, a former Beavers linebacker, to replace Smith — as well as revamped schedules and an optimism that they cannot only survive the Pac-12 purge, but thrive in their new realities. They do so with control of the Pac-12 and its assets, after the Washington state supreme court decided Friday not to review a lower court’s ruling that determined the conference board would consist of only OSU and WSU.
Earlier this month, both teams reached a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West Conference that will see them add six games against MWC schools to their schedules next season. It’s a move that provides OSU and WSU a stopgap until their long-term future can be determined.
But significant challenges await, especially around building rosters through the portal and high school recruits and convincing current players to stay, which makes the offseason even more important.
“We’ve tried to attack every point of, ‘Hey, this is our conference, this is our situation, this is what the lawsuit means, this is what we’re trying to do,'” WSU coach Jake Dickert said. “This is the bridge here, as we’re calling it.”
BARNES SENSED THE mood around Oregon State shift as soon as he promoted Bray, who had crafted a solid defense in his second coaching stint at his alma mater. Bray knew the players, the school, the fan base and the recruiting realities. After the hire, Barnes immediately excused Bray from Sun Bowl preparations so he could dive into the personnel puzzle. (Interim coach Kefense Hynson will prepare the team for the bowl game.)
Bray has spent the past few weeks re-recruiting the roster, adding transfers and shaping the 2024 recruiting class. Although he has had to combat some negative recruiting — “Oh, you’re a Mountain West team now,” is the primary potshot — the transfers and high school players interested in joining Oregon State are, in some cases, easier to sway than the existing Beavers players. The Beavers have added transfers such as Colorado offensive lineman Van Wells, a multiyear starter, and productive Middle Tennessee defensive back Jakobe Thomas. High school recruiting has been slower, but over the weekend the Beavers’ class expanded to nine recruits with the commitments of Adam Hawkes, Will Haverland and Cornell Hatcher II, though they did lose Terrell Kim.
“Because they didn’t live that carpet being pulled out from under ’em, like our players on our roster, with the conference realignment and all that stuff, they can look at it as, ‘OK, you’re still in this Power 5 space,'” Bray said. “We get to build a schedule, so the opportunity to make it to the expanded playoff is probably better now than it was if we were in the Pac-12, or, really, if we joined the Big Ten.”
Both Oregon State and Washington State see a viable CFP path in their future and have been outlining that possibility to current and potential players. The teams on Thursday released their 2024 opponents, which include each other, a batch of Mountain West matchups and other power-conference opponents, including rivalry games with both Oregon and Washington. Oregon State will face Purdue and Cal, while WSU will host Texas Tech.
A two-team Pac-12 isn’t expected to meet the criteria for its champion — if one is even crowned — to qualify for playoff purposes, but both programs feel they will be uniquely placed to contend for playoff appearances as at-large teams.
“We showed our team Washington’s schedule and Oregon’s schedule and USC’s schedule and the theme is they probably have to be 11-1 to make the playoffs,” Dickert said. “Well, we’ve got an opportunity to go out here and play a couple Power 4 teams and these nonconference deals, and you rip off a bunch of wins, you got an opportunity to make the top 12.”
Dickert brought up Liberty, which didn’t play any Power 5 opponents this year but received the Group of 5’s berth in a New Year’s Six bowl, where it will take on Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl.
“They ripped off an undefeated season and they’re No. 18 [in the AP poll],” he said. “So our schedule is gonna give us an opportunity to make the playoff and everything’s got to be designed around that.”
Bray’s general pitch to play for Oregon State hasn’t changed, despite the circumstances. Oregon State is “a place of substance,” he said, rooted in player development and seeking those “interested in the long game, not just the quick fix, the quick buck.” At the core is an opportunity to reach the NFL, which drew Uiagalelei from Clemson last winter. Oregon State has had eight players selected in the past four drafts.
The NFL ties helped Oregon State retain running back Damien Martinez, a first-team All-Pac-12 selection who has 2,167 yards in his first two seasons with the Beavers. Martinez, a 232-pound battering ram from Lewisville, Texas, likely would have his pick of transfer destinations.
“It’s the best place for him to get to where he wants to be in the end, which is the National Football League,” Bray said. “He hasn’t bought into all the hype of, ‘You gotta be here, you gotta be there.’ He’s like, ‘No, I can do everything I want to do right [at Oregon State].'”
WSU will live in that same space, hoping to lean into a player development model, while plugging in transfers where it makes sense. The main difference is they can no longer recruit to the strength of the conference.
“I think perceptually, you feel like you lose that power chip of, ‘Hey, a Group of 5 transfer knows that you’re going to play against elite competition or a high school kid knows we’re different than some of those other schools that we’re playing,” Dickert said. “I think we understand the challenge of what that means and we’re just selling ourselves a little bit more than selling the league.”
Although Oregon State endured significant portal losses this month, the program has dealt with them before. Mascarenas-Arnold, who committed to transfer to USC late Saturday, is a first-team All-Pac-12 performer, just like linebacker Omar Speights, who started 39 games for Oregon State before transferring to LSU in January. But Oregon State has produced first-team All-Pac-12 linebackers in each of the past four seasons, and Bray is confident he will “get someone to play that role.”
The Beavers have added several transfers with starting experience and also saw several 2024 recruits decommit after Smith’s departure. But Bray is encouraged by who is showing interest in the program, both “the overall number and where they’re from.”
“It looks like a dark time, [but] I think we can actually improve our roster with some of the guys we lose, and some of the guys that are interested, that we can take,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to get better, to be honest.”
WHEN WSU CAME up just short in a 24-21 Apple Cup loss to Washington, it represented the end of a disappointing season that had started with four straight wins. The Cougars had climbed to No. 13 in the AP poll — two spots behind Alabama — but a stretch of six straight losses followed as momentum faded and they finished with a 5-7 record.
By the time the Apple Cup arrived, Dickert already knew Ward would be moving on. WSU was able to land Ward as a transfer from FCS program Incarnate Word, in part because there was a modest NIL package involved. But that type of process is expected to be rare.
“[WSU’s NIL offering is] definitely nothing in the recruiting realm like other people and what you’re hearing, where they can go out and pay for a bunch of guys to come in,” Dickert said. “So, that’s just the realistic state of where we’re at.”
After two strong seasons in Pullman, Ward’s services would be worth millions of dollars in NIL money. Even though he had a positive experience at WSU, the life-changing money that was available elsewhere made his departure a straightforward business decision.
“We planned for that, we prepared for it, we communicated greatly with him and his family,” Dickert said. Such is the financial reality at both schools.
When Ward officially entered the portal on Dec. 1, Uiagalelei was already there and Chiles joined them on Dec. 6. All three were among the most heavily sought-after quarterbacks in the transfer market (Chiles has since committed to play for Smith at Michigan State).
It’s impossible to say, definitively, how things might have played out had the Pac-12 not fallen apart, but competitiveness within the NIL marketplace is only set to play a bigger role in college football in the coming years.
“I think we’re more competitive than we were last year,” Dickert said. “Everything I do now, I kind of compare it to Oregon State, because they are our peer competitor. I think they’ve been more invested in it. We have enough to make sure when our guys are on the field and make plays, I believe they’re going to be compensated for that.”
Dickert said the Cougars intend to add a quarterback through the transfer portal (OSU likely will, too). But other than some specific needs — like wide receiver and defensive back — he has spent the bulk of his time on the recruiting trail focused on high school players.
It’s not the glamorous lifestyle that some colleges often try to portray it to be.
“As it’s always been, we’re flying commercial, that stuff has never changed,” Dickert said. “I’m not on the [private jet]. Sometimes that means I’m in 36F in the back. Our program has a little blue-collar approach to it.”
SINCE SEPTEMBER, WHEN OSU and WSU filed for a temporary restraining order against the Pac-12 and commissioner George Kliavkoff to prevent the conference from holding board meetings including the 10 departing schools, OSU and WSU have been operating more like partners than rivals at the university and athletic department levels.
Friday’s ruling from the Washington state supreme court represents their biggest collective win. With control of the conference board comes control of the conference’s finances, turning the tables on the departing schools in a way most of them probably were not anticipating when they sought out safe harbor during the Pac-12’s summer collapse.
As the legal battle played out, the coaches mostly kept their distance — even while fielding questions about what it all meant on the recruiting trail.
“Obviously, it’s a big part of our future is securing that lawsuit and what comes with it,” Dickert said. “And I don’t know all the particulars about it. I just know it’s a big part of our future that we’re fighting for. It’s very important for not just the football program, but Washington State University at large.”
What happens next is shrouded in mystery. The schools have made clear their intent to rebuild the Pac-12, but their plan for the existing revenue is unknown. They already blocked a customary midyear conference-wide distribution before the Supreme Court ruling was issued and now that they have full control, there is widespread speculation that full shares won’t be distributed around the conference. At minimum, a portion of the conference revenue is expected to be set aside to account for pending liabilities, and there also looms the possibility further revenue could be withheld as a punitive measure.
The prevailing sentiment seems to be: Who can blame them?
In all instances of conference realignment, each school has made decisions based on what is in its own best interest. If OSU and WSU play hardball with revenue from the Pac-12 — a conference that the other schools willingly withdrew from — it would represent more of the same.
It’s a state of affairs that UCLA coach Chip Kelly couldn’t help but express his embarrassment over while discussing what has transpired ahead of the Bruins’ game against Boise State in the LA Bowl on Friday.
“A bunch of people couldn’t keep this conference together, and that’s sad,” said Kelly, whose athletic director, Martin Jarmond, was instrumental in UCLA’s move to the Big Ten, which helped set everything in motion. “This conference has been together since 1915, and we’re supposed to be the smart ones. I heard [Iowa coach] Kirk Ferentz talking in front of Congress when they were talking about realignment and NIL and he said, ‘We ought to be the dumbest people in the world.’
“This is an amazing game. We keep trying to screw it up. I’m talking the administrators and coaches, it’s on us. The fact that there is not going to be a Pac-12 next year, the fact that Washington State is not going to be in a conference next year, the fact that Oregon State is not going to be in a conference, we failed.”
OREGON STATE AND Washington State are separated by the Cascade mountain range and several hundred miles, but the schools are linked, at least in the foreseeable future, through shared circumstances. University presidents Jayathi Murthy and Kirk Schultz issued joint statements throughout the late summer and fall. Barnes and WSU athletic director Pat Chun talk “multiple times a week and sometimes multiple times a day,” Barnes said.
Bray’s path is intertwined with both schools. His father, Craig, was a longtime college coach who logged two stints as a Washington State assistant. Trent Bray graduated from Pullman High School, less than two miles from WSU’s Martin Stadium, and verbally committed to play for the Cougars before switching to Oregon State when Craig left to become the Beavers’ defensive coordinator.
Oregon State and Washington State are still bullish on their futures, despite the Pac-12 dissolving and a long-term outlook that Barnes admits has “yet to be determined.” The Beavers have won 25 games since the start of the 2021 season, their best stretch since 2006 to 2009, when the team averaged nine wins per year. Despite the disappointing end to this season, Washington State reached bowls in each of the previous seven full seasons.
Donors and fans remain engaged for both. Barnes expects to sell out all seven home games in 2024.
“The momentum we’ve had is palpable,” he said. “Although there’s been some ebbs and flows, as people’s emotions take hold in reading the latest on the ticker. … Fans, although they’ve been concerned, every piece of information we provide them creates more enthusiasm toward that momentum.”
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Andrea Adelson
ORLANDO, Fla. — Scott Frost walks into the UCF football building and into his office, the one he used the last time he had this job, eight years ago. The shades are drawn, just like they used to be. There are drawings from his three kids tacked to the walls. There are still trophies sitting on a shelf.
He still parks in the same spot before he walks into that same building and sits at the same desk. The only thing that has changed is that the desk is positioned in a different part of the room.
But the man doing all the same things at the University of Central Florida is a different Scott Frost than the one who left following that undefeated 2017 season to take the head coach job at Nebraska.
UCF might look the same, but the school is different now, too. The Knights are now in a Power 4 conference, and there is now a 12-team College Football Playoff that affords them the opportunity to play for national championships — as opposed to self-declaring them. Just outside his office, construction is underway to upgrade the football stadium. The same, but different.
“I know I’m a wiser person and smarter football coach,” Frost said during a sit-down interview with ESPN. “When you’re young, you think you have it all figured out. I don’t think you really get better as a person unless you go through really good things, and really bad things. I just know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
Out on the practice field, Frost feels the most at home — he feels comfort in going back to the place that has defined nearly every day of his life. As a young boy, he learned the game from his mom and dad, both football coaches, then thrived as a college and NFL player before going into coaching.
He coaches up his players with a straightforwardness that quarterbacks coach McKenzie Milton remembers fondly from their previous time together at UCF. Milton started at quarterback on the 2017 undefeated team, and the two remained close after Frost left.
“I see the same version of him from when I was here as a player,” Milton said. “Even though the dynamic in college football has changed dramatically with the portal and NIL, I think Coach Frost is one of the few coaches that can still bring a group of guys together and turn them into a team, just with who he is and what he’s done and what he’s been through in his life. He knows what it looks like to succeed, both as a coach and a player.”
Since his return, Frost has had to adjust to those changes to college football, but he said, “I love coming into work every day. We’ve got the right kids who love football. We’re working them hard. They want to be pushed. They want to be challenged. We get to practice with palm trees and sunshine and, we’re playing big-time football. But it’s also just not the constant stress meat grinder of some other places.”
Meat grinder of some other places.
Might he mean a place such as Nebraska?
“You can think what you want,” Frost said. “One thing I told myself — I’m never going to talk about that. It just doesn’t feel good to talk about. I’ll get asked 100 questions. This is about UCF. I just don’t have anything to say.”
Frost says he has no regrets about leaving UCF, even though he didn’t get the results he had hoped for at his alma mater. When Nebraska decided to part ways with coach Mike Riley in 2017, Frost seemed the best, most obvious candidate to replace him. He had been the starting quarterback on the 1997 team, the last Nebraska team to win a national title.
He now had the coaching résumé to match. Frost had done the unthinkable at UCF — taking a program that was winless the season before he arrived, to undefeated and the talk of the college football world just two years later.
But he could not ignore the pull of Nebraska and the opportunities that came along with power conference football.
“I was so happy here,” Frost said. “We went undefeated and didn’t get a chance to win a championship, at least on the field. You are always striving to reach higher goals. I had always told myself I wasn’t going to leave here unless there was a place that you can legitimately go and win a national championship. It was a tough decision because I didn’t want to leave regardless of which place it was.”
Indeed, Frost maintains he was always happy at UCF. But he also knew returning to Nebraska would make others happy, too.
“I think I kind of knew that wasn’t best for me,” he said. “It was what some other people wanted me to do to some degree.”
In four-plus seasons with the Cornhuskers, Frost went 16-31 — including 5-22 in one-score games. He was fired three games into the 2022 season after a home loss to Georgia Southern.
After Frost was fired, he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where his wife has family. He reflected on what happened during his tenure with the Cornhuskers but also about what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He tried to stay connected to the game, coaching in the U.S. Army Bowl, a high school all-star game in Frisco, Texas, in December 2022. Milton coached alongside him, and distinctly remembers a conversation they had.
“He said, ‘It’s my goal to get back to UCF one day,'” Milton said. “At that time, I was like, ‘I pray to God that happens.'”
If that was the ultimate goal, Frost needed to figure out how to position himself to get back there. While he contemplated his future, he coached his son’s flag football team to a championship. Frost found the 5- and 6-year-olds he coached “listen better than 19-year-olds sometimes.”
Ultimately, he decided on a career reboot in the NFL. Frost had visited the Rams during their offseason program, and when a job came open in summer 2024, Rams coach Sean McVay immediately reached out.
Frost was hired as a senior analyst, primarily helping with special teams but also working with offense and defense.
“It was more just getting another great leader in the building, someone who has been a head coach, that has wisdom and a wealth of experience to be able to learn from,” McVay told ESPN. “His ability to be able to communicate to our players from a great coaching perspective, but also have the empathy and the understanding from when he played — all of those things were really valuable.”
McVay said he and Frost had long discussions about handling the challenges that come with falling short as a head coach.
“There’s strength in the vulnerability,” McVay said. “I felt that from him. There’s a real power in the perspective that you have from those different experiences. If you can really look at some of the things that maybe didn’t go down the way you wanted to within the framework of your role and responsibility, real growth can occur. I saw that in him.”
Frost says his time with the Rams rejuvenated him.
“It brought me back,” Frost said. “Sometimes when you’re a head coach or maybe even a coordinator, you forget how fun it is to be around the game when it’s not all on you all the time. What I did was a very small part, and we certainly weren’t going to win or lose based on every move that I made, and I didn’t have to wear the losses and struggle for the victories like you do when you’re a head coach. I’m so grateful to those guys.”
UCF athletics director Terry Mohajir got a call from then-head coach Gus Malzahn last November. Malzahn, on the verge of finishing his fourth season at UCF, was contemplating becoming offensive coordinator at Florida State. Given all the responsibilities on his desk as head coach — from NIL to the transfer portal to roster management — he found the idea of going back to playcalling appealing. Mohajir started preparing a list of candidates and was told Thanksgiving night that Malzahn had planned to step down.
Though Frost previously worked at UCF under athletics director Danny White, he and Mohajir had a preexisting relationship. Mohajir said he reached out to Frost after he was fired at Nebraska to gauge his interest in returning to UCF as offensive coordinator under Malzahn. But Frost was not ready.
This time around, Mohajir learned quickly that Frost had interest in returning as head coach. Mohajir called McVay and Rams general manager Les Snead. They told him Frost did anything that was asked of him, including making copies around the office.
“They said, ‘You would never know he was the head coach at a major college program.” Mohajir also called former Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts to get a better understanding about what happened with the Cornhuskers.
“Fits are a huge piece, and not everybody fits,” Mohajir said.
After eight conversations, Mohajir decided he wanted to meet Frost in person. They met at an airport hotel in Dallas.
“He was motivated,” Mohajir said. “We went from coast to coast, talked to coordinators, head coaches, pro guys, all kinds of different folks. And at the end of the day, I really believe that Scott wanted the job the most.”
The first day back in Orlando, Dec. 8, was a blur. Frost woke up at 3:45 a.m. in California to be able to make it to Florida in time for his introductory news conference with his family.
When they pulled into the campus, his first time back since he left in 2017, Frost said he was in a fog. It took another 24 hours for him and his wife, Ashley, to take a deep exhale.
“Rather than bouncing around chasing NFL jobs, we thought maybe we would be able to plant some roots here and have our kids be in a stable place for a while at a place that I really enjoyed coaching and that I think it has a chance to evolve into a place that could win a lot of football games,” Frost said. “All that together was just enough to get me to come back.”
The natural question now is whether Frost can do what he did during his first tenure.
That 2017 season stands as the only winning season of his head coaching career, but it carries so much weight with UCF fans because of its significance as both the best season in school history, and one that changed both its own future and college football.
After UCF finished 13-0, White self-declared the Knights national champions. Locked out of the four-team playoff after finishing No. 12 in the final CFP standings, White started lobbying for more attention to be paid to schools outside the power conferences.
That season also positioned UCF to pounce during the next wave of realignment. Sure enough, in 2023, the Knights began play in a Power 4 conference for the first time as Big 12 members. This past season, the CFP expanded to 12 teams. Unlike 2017, UCF now has a defined path to play for a national title and no longer has to go undefeated and then pray for a shot. Win the Big 12 championship, no matter the record, and UCF is in the playoff.
But Frost cautions those who expect the clock to turn back to 2017.
“I don’t think there’s many people out there that silly,” Frost said. “People joke about that with me, that they’re going to expect you go into undefeated in the first year. I think the fans are a little more realistic than that.”
The game, of course, is different. Had the transfer portal and NIL existed when Frost was at UCF during his first tenure, he might not have been able to keep the 2017 team together. The 2018 team, which went undefeated under Josh Heupel before losing to LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, might not have stayed together, either.
This upcoming season, UCF will receive a full share of television revenue from the Big 12, after receiving a half share (estimated $18 million) in each of his first two seasons. While that is more than what it received in the AAC, it is less than what other Big 12 schools received, making it harder to compete immediately. It also struggled with NIL funding. As a result, in its first two years in the conference, UCF went 5-13 in Big 12 play and 10-15 overall.
Assuming the House v. NCAA settlement goes into effect this summer, Mohajir says UCF is aiming to spend the full $20.5 million, including fully funding football.
“It’s like we moved to the fancy neighborhood, and we got a job that’s going to pay us money over time, and we’re going to do well over time, but we’re stretching a little to be there right now, and that requires a lot of effort from a lot of people and a lot of commitment from a lot of people,” Frost said. “So far, the help that we’ve gotten has been impressive.”
Mohajir points out that UCF has had five coaching changes over the past 10 years, dating back to the final season under George O’Leary in 2015, when the Knights went 0-12. Frost says he wants to be in for the long term, and Mohajir hopes consistency at head coach will be an added benefit. Mohajir believes UCF is getting the best of Frost in this moment and scoffs at any questions about whether rehiring him will work again.
“Based on what I’m seeing right now, it will absolutely work,” Mohajir said. “But I don’t really look at it as ‘working again.’ It’s not ‘again.’ It’s, ‘Will it work?’ Because it’s a different era.”
To that end, Frost says success is not recreating 2017 and going undefeated. Rather, Frost said, “If our group now can help us become competitive in the Big 12, and then, from time to time, compete for championships and make us more relevant nationally, I think we’ll have done our job to help catapult UCF again.”
You could say he is looking for the same result. He’s just taking a different route there.
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Max Olson
Houston transfer safety A.J. Haulcy committed to LSU on Sunday, his agency, A&P Sports, told ESPN.
Haulcy, the top player still available and No. 1 safety in ESPN’s spring transfer portal rankings, committed to the Tigers after taking an official visit Sunday. Miami, Ole Miss and SMU were also contenders for his pledge.
The 6-foot, 215-pound senior defensive back has started 32 games over his three college seasons and earned first-team All-Big 12 honors in 2024 after producing 74 tackles, 8 pass breakups and 5 interceptions, which tied for most in the conference.
LSU has assembled one of the top incoming transfer classes in the country this offseason with 18 signees, including six players — wide receivers Barion Brown (Kentucky) and Nic Anderson (Oklahoma), linemen Braelin Moore (Virginia Tech) and Josh Thompson (Northwestern), cornerback Mansoor Delane (Virginia Tech) and defensive end Patrick Payton (LSU) — who ranked among the top 60 in ESPN’s winter transfer rankings.
The Tigers also landed USF transfer Bernard Gooden, one of the most coveted defensive tackles in the spring transfer window.
Haulcy began his career at New Mexico in 2022, earning a starting role as a true freshman and recording 87 tackles, including a career-high 24 against Fresno State, and two interceptions. The Houston native entered the transfer portal at the end of the season and came home to play for the Cougars.
As a sophomore in 2023, Haulcy recorded a team-high 98 tackles and received votes for Big 12 Defensive Newcomer of the Year from the league’s coaches.
Haulcy chose to re-enter the portal April 21 after Houston’s spring game, as did starting cornerback Jeremiah Wilson, who’ll continue his career at Florida State. Wilson and Haulcy were the Nos. 11 and 12 players, respectively, in ESPN’s spring transfer rankings.
BYU picked up a pair of key transfer portal additions Saturday, as brothers Bear and Tiger Bachmeier told ESPN that they have committed to play for the Cougars next season.
The brothers are transferring from Stanford and project to be key players of the immediate and long-term plans for the BYU program.
Bear, a quarterback, committed Saturday morning at the end of his visit, he told ESPN. He is a class of 2025 recruit who committed to Stanford out of high school and enrolled there this spring.
Both Bachmeiers elected to transfer in the wake of Stanford’s dismissal of head coach Troy Taylor in March. After visiting BYU coach Kalani Sitake’s program in recent days, the brothers committed.
For Bear, he is expected to be one of the backups for successful incumbent quarterback Jake Retzlaff in 2025 and compete for the starting job at BYU in 2026.
Bear was attracted to BYU’s open offensive scheme and a rich history of quarterbacks that includes a strong recent run under offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick. He also referenced BYU’s historical success, which stretches from Jim McMahon to Ty Detmer to Steve Young.
“The ability to come in and win games and [Coach] Roderick’s scheme and the pedigree of quarterbacks they have produced in history and recently is enticing,” Bear told ESPN.
Tiger told ESPN he committed to BYU later Saturday. He’ll arrive at BYU having graduated from Stanford in two-and-a-half years with a degree in computer science. He’ll enroll in a graduate program at BYU, he said.
Tiger will be expected to be an immediate contributor at wide receiver. He caught 46 balls over two seasons at Stanford for 476 yards and two touchdowns. He has two years of eligibility remaining.
Bear and Tiger are the second and third brothers to play major college football in their family. Their older brother, Hank Bachmeier, played quarterback at Boise State, Louisiana Tech and Wake Forest, where his college career concluded last year.
There is one more Bachmeier brother remaining: Buck Bachmeier will be a freshman in high school in the fall.
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