“Success breeds success. It’s hard to sell success when you haven’t had success.”

— Former Idaho State linebacker and five-time state championship coach Scott Berger

I interviewed Berger last week for an upcoming column, and I asked him about his alma mater’s ongoing struggles in football. I figured Berger had a unique perspective on what ails Idaho State, having played on the Bengals 1981 national championship team, coached at Idaho Falls’ Skyline High School for 32 years, where ISU occasionally recruited his players, and his son Michael played at Idaho State from 2010-2014.

“I’ll just equate it to the high school level: instead of finding a way to win a game, you seem to find a way to lose a game,” Berger said. “When you’ve had success and kids have been in the battles, they know. It’s amazing how they just find a way to win.”

As any long-suffering fan of Idaho State football knows, the Bengals have found a way to lose a whole lot more games than they’ve won over their history. Over the past 40 years, no Idaho State football coach had departed of his own volition for a better job until Charlie Ragle quit on Monday to take a position as an assistant at Arizona State. And Ragle’s departure after one season and a 1-10 record could hardly be hailed as a “turning point” for the program.

ISU football coach Charlie Ragle resigns after one season

Idaho State University head football coach Charlie Ragle has resigned from his position and …

What makes Ragle’s departure so disturbing is that ISU’s administration bent over backwards to try to help make him successful. They increased the budget for assistant coaches, and allowed him to add two more assistant positions. They made a multi-million-dollar commitment to upgrade the interior of Holt Arena, and started work on a number of smaller, less visible facilities upgrades. They gave Ragle a five-year contract, which gave him the job security to make decisions based on long term success.

But Ragle, who came to ISU after serving as a special teams coordinator at Cal, never really seemed to move the needle with the Bengal program. True, he inherited a roster short of Big Sky talent, but as the season went on, the Bengals seemed to regress rather than improve. In particular, the offense was a mess, averaging just 13.7 points a game. The low point had to be the second half at Cal-Davis, where ISU was held to 1 first down and 23 total yards.

Everything Charlie Ragle said after ISU's blowout loss to UC Davis

Idaho State head coach Charlie Ragle had a lot to say after his group’s 43-3 loss to UC Davi…

Even more disappointing was the way Ragle openly criticized his players. He went off on a bizarre rant after the Cal-Davis game, promising to clean house after the season, and only take the players who were giving maximum effort on the road to the next game at Weber State. I honestly don’t know how you recruit after making some of the comments Ragle made about his players. How do you sit in the living room of a high school athlete with his parents and tell them their son needs to put his future in Ragle’s hands after the way he criticized his current players?

From that perspective, Ragle probably did Idaho State a favor by walking away from the last four years of his contract. That still doesn’t solve the long-term, systemic issues that have combined to limit ISU to just five winning seasons over the last 22 years, but it does give ISU President Kevin Satterlee and Athletic Director Pauline Thiros the opportunity for a reboot in the near term.

First, let’s acknowledge those “systemic issues”: athletic facilities that lag behind the more successful programs in the conference, a history of losing, geographic isolation that makes it difficult to bring in recruits and makes it hard and expensive for their families to attend games, a relatively small and beaten-down fan base, one of the smallest athletic department budgets in the conference and a recruiting base that lacks large numbers of college prospects, and whose loyalties are divided among about a dozen other, more successful programs. Throw in the relatively conservative culture and lack of diversity in the area, and it narrows your recruiting base to young men who are comfortable with the southeastern Idaho culture.

Some of those systemic issues are being addressed, however slowly, like improved facilities. Eventually Idaho State will have to build an “athletes center,” like the multi-million-dollar facilities that Montana and Montana State have constructed. These facilities are all the rage at the Power 5 schools, and typically include state-of-the-art weight training, film rooms, player lounges, and luxurious locker rooms. Idaho State won’t be able to afford anything like what the “big boys” have constructed, but if they’re going to compete for recruits, they’ll eventually have to build the best athletes center they can afford.

Some of the other issues, like a history of losing and a beaten-down fan base, can only be changed by improved performance on the field. There’s your classic chicken-egg conundrum: how to recruit to improve performance, when your past performance has been so bad?

Finally, there are some issues you just have to live with — geographic isolation, conservative culture and limited local recruiting base.

What Idaho State has shown in recent years is that you can occasionally overcome all those systemic issues with one thing: identity. The “Throwin’ Idahoans” won the national title in 1981 because they were one of the first teams in the Big Sky to go to a wide-open offense. Larry Lewis took one look at the artificial turf and indoor climate at Holt Arena and made a commitment to throwing the football from day one. He had three winning seasons – 2000, 2002 and 2003, and those teams averaged 28, 28 and 33 points a game.

Mike Kramer, who brought with him an experienced offensive coordinator in Don Bailey, went 8-4 in 2014 with a team that averaged 40 points a game behind all-American quarterback Justin Arias. Rob Phenicie, who had ISU’s last winning season at 6-5 in 2018, put up 34 points a game that year.

I’ve said it before and I’ll reiterate it here: if you want to win in the Big Sky Conference, you must score. The top six teams in the conference this past season all averaged at least 36 points a game. Montana State and Sacramento State, who both finished unbeaten in the league this year, averaged 45 and 41.5 points a contest, respectively.

Here’s some free advice for Satterlee and Thiros as they embark on their next coaching search: find a coach with an identity, preferably one that is tied to a wide-open offense. There are absolutely no guarantees that they’ll win consistently – in fact history suggests they won’t. But they will be able to sell recruits and fans a vision – a daring, wide-open approach that will be both fun to watch and fun to play. You have to have good quarterback play to be good in the Big Sky Conference. The best way to recruit good quarterbacks is to offer them an offense where their skills shine.

So let the search for the next Idaho State coach begin, and let it be known far and wide, that you’re looking for a coach with an identity – a coach who will bring “fun” back to Holt Arena.

Brad Bugger has observed athletics in southeastern Idaho for over 40 years, as a sportswriter, broadcaster and fan. He can be reached with comments, questions and column suggestions at bpbugger@gmail.com.