Talking it up with a couple of Beaver sages

The scribe, flanked by Hall-of-Famers Pat Casey (left) and Mike Riley

CORVALLIS — Pat Casey and Mike Riley are two of the most respected names in the history of Oregon State athletics. Both are members of the OSU Sports Hall of Fame and the state of Oregon’s Sports Hall of Fame. Casey is in the University of Portland and George Fox halls of fame along with the College Baseball Hall of Fame and, next year, will be inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame. Riley is a member of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Hall of Fame and was the first player to have his football jersey number (11) retired at Corvallis High.

Casey, 66, won three national championships and five Pac-10/12 titles and won 900 games in 24 seasons as the Beavers’ baseball coach. Riley, 72, has the most wins of any football coach in school history (93) and took the Beavers to eight bowl games in 14 years, winning six.

Both are retired — well, semi-retired — and living in Corvallis. Over lunch, I sat them down and got a read on their opinions on a number of topics in the sports world.

Let’s cover what you guys are up to these days. Pat, you have been working with manager Pat Murphy, your old friend and rival from Arizona State, in player development with the Milwaukee Brewers. You got a taste of it last season and are now into it as a part-time gig. What does it entail?

CASEY: It is a unique job. There is no real job description. I get to pick my own schedule. One of the things is, I am providing their front office and coaches with another set of eyes on their players. I come in with a different perspective. If I see things, I discuss them with people in the front office. I will sit down with Cam Castro (senior VP/player development) and talk about players. Another part is, I will go to our affiliates and get a look at some of our prospects. They want me to see each of their affiliates at least one time. I am looking at players, but also, some of the coaches (in the minors) are young. I can go in there and visit with them and talk to them about coaching situations.

You have already been to the Double-A club in Biloxi, Miss., and to the Single-A affiliate in Zebulon, N.C.

CASEY: I go in, watch pregame, put a uniform on, go into the dugout and be a part of it during a game.You get to talk to young players and to coaches. I have had coaches approach me and ask questions about how I see a kid, or maybe if they want some insight as to how to reach a player. What would I think? That happened this week. One of our coaches was trying to help a guy and was looking at a different way to reach him. We visited about that.

And you were in Phoenix for at least spring training. Do they have you wearing No. 5?

CASEY: (laughs) In the big leagues now, the coaches don’t wear numbers, they just have pullovers on. But when I was at spring training, they had a ‘5’ on there.

How often have you been back to Milwaukee?

CASEY: I have been there twice this season. I was there for a series with the Orioles and with the Twins, so I got to visit with Adley (Rutschman) and (Trevor) Larnach. I was up in Seattle for two games when the Brewers played there last week. It is not a big pressure job, but it keeps me in the game. I love competition. It is good for me, and I have a different perspective of big-league players now. I realize there are a lot of guys who like to play the game.

Mike, you are about to begin your second year on the 13-member College Football Player selection committee. You were installed last year when Washington athletic director Pat Chun, then at Washington State, stepped down.

RILEY: It happened out of the blue. In the spring of 2024, I got a phone call from (CFP executive director) Bill Hancock. We had never met. He asked me if I had interest. I was in limbo in a lot of ways with Dee health-wise. (Mike’s wife, Dee, died in June 2024). I talked to my kids to see if they thought it was doable. As it turned out, it was a schedule that allowed me to be in Corvallis much of the time. I said yes, and didn’t know what I was getting into.

What are your duties?

RILEY: Our job is to rank the FBS teams. We have nothing to do with the (CFP) seeding or how the whole process is put together. We are told to rank teams one through 25.

When does the “process” begin?

RILEY: There was a “rookie” meeting in September, but we really don’t start voting until the end of October. I’m glad we don’t do preseason. By the time we start meeting, the season has taken shape. But I started ranking teams right off the bat, one through 25, so I am organized going in. I made probably seven trips to Dallas for meetings the second half of the season. I would leave Corvallis at 3 in the morning on Sunday and get to Dallas in the afternoon. I would usually have dinner with (committee member) Jim Grove, my old buddy from Wake Forest. We would watch some film to make sure my rankings are ready. On Monday, (the committee) would start in the morning and work all day, usually til about 9 p.m. We would meet again Tuesday morning and submit our votes. I would fly out in the afternoon and be back in Corvallis about 9 that night.

Is there a lot of debate? Does it ever get contentious?

RILEY: Not really, but there is a lot of back and forth. Everybody is encouraged to give an opinion based on their preparation. It is actually a roundtable discussion and then a vote. An abundance of information is provided that is referred to during the meetings. It is really well-organized. It is thought-provoking while you are in the middle of it. You want to do a good job. You have to be prepared, watch a lot of (video). I appreciate the people who are on the committee. After a couple of weeks, I remember thinking, “This is a conscientious group trying to do a hard job.” I have enjoyed it. It has kept me involved in football. During the season, it gives me the excuse, “I gotta watch a lot of games.” (laughs.)

NEW: The Dean of Portland Sports is now on BlueSky.

Pat Casey’s SOAR4 Foundation donated more than $100,000 to charity over the past eight months

Pat, in 2021 you began your foundation, SOAR4 (Share Our Abundant Resources), a 501 (C) (3) organization with four pillars — feeding the hungry, housing and shelter, health services and education. Please update us on what is happening.

CASEY: In coaching, a lot of people do a lot of things for you. I always thought when I am out of coaching, I would like to return the favor. There are a lot of charities out there that are big and have a lot of overhead. If I was going to do it, I wanted to be able to say that we have no overhead. We take care of all the expenses. It’s been great. We gave more than $100,000 away over the last eight months. We are not like a lot of the bigger charities such as St. Jude. We look for people or organizations off the beaten path. We look for smaller things.

For instance?

CASEY: “DEAR Day” is a day program for adults with developmental disabilities who require 24-hour assistance. Most of them are in wheelchairs. They have people who take care of them, read to them, play music for them and sometimes require 24-hour assistance. Most of them are in wheelchairs. We made a donation.

In April, floods in Burns damaged at least 950 homes. So many people were displaced. We sent money to Harney County. We knew the money was helping the displaced victims.

Stone Soup is a volunteer program in Corvallis. They feed meals to people in need twice a day. We made a donation.

Daytime Drop-In Center in Corvallis helps people who are confronting poverty and homelessness, including single pregnant women. We have supported them with some funding.

I didn’t realize there are so many high school kids on the coast who don’t have enough money to go to college. We donate to Rising Star, an organization that motivates the kids to get an education but also helps fund them to go on to college.

How do you raise money for SOAR4?

CASEY: It comes from fund-raising. We get contributions from all over. We have a board of directors. Our job is not only to procure funds but to go out and find people who really need it. For instance, we found a family with four kids that didn’t have a washer and dryer. I am glad we were able to help them.

I am assuming you are the lead fund-raiser.

CASEY: It is challenging. It is humbling enough to ask somebody for money to build a stadium to watch Adley Rutschman play baseball. (Donors) can identify with that. But (with SOAR4) we are asking them to help us out, and they may never know anybody who receives the assistance. We have made it a point to go to these places (of need) and walk in and visit with them. We have met with them, and donors know our money is going where it should go. I pay for 100 percent of the expenses. It is a good feeling. It has been wonderful for me, really.

Mike, much of your free time in recent months has been spent watching the athletic exploits of your grandson, Eli Riley-Stevenson, who will be an eighth-grader in the fall at Cheldelin Middle School.

RILEY: Yeah, I’m his Uber driver (laughs). He turns 14 on Aug. 4. He is not driving yet, so he needs rides to all his games and practices. I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy his friends. They are a great group of kids. I watch a lot of his practices and as many games as I can. I took him to an all-comers track meet a couple of weeks ago in Eugene.

He won the 100, 200 and long jump in the state middle school championships at Corvallis High. He advanced to the nationals in Philadelphia and won his heat, but missed the final. Why?

RILEY: He and another finalist were warming up in an area outside the track and didn’t hear the call. The race started 10 minutes early. They got there just before the race, but (officials) wouldn’t let them go.

Eli is also a standout football player. His father, ex-Beaver running back Jovan Stevenson, is the head coach at Crescent Valley, and Eli has been working out with the Raider players all summer. In a recent 7-on-7 scrimmage against Roosevelt High, he caught a touchdown pass.

RILEY: He got to play about half the game. He had fun. Through carting him around, I get to do a lot of stuff with him. I grew up with no grandparents. I am taking advantage of having Eli and his sister, CiCi.

Members of the CFP selection committee each got two tickets to the national championship game in Atlanta. Everybody brought their wives. With Dee’s passing, my plus-one was Eli. We had four of the most fun days. When I was coaching in the USFL, I had him at our training camp (in Birmingham). For seven weeks, we lived in the Residence Inn together. I put him to work at practice. He had a job to do. The players loved him. I took him out after practice and I would throw him about 50 passes. We had a blast. One of the most fun times I had in coaching. 

I would like to hear thoughts from both of you on NIL (name, image and likeness) and the effect it is having on college athletics. NIL money has had a major impact on the transfer portal, too. The numbers are staggering. More than 4,800 FBS scholarship players entered the portal this year. In basketball, the count was nearly 2,700. In baseball, it was 2,700. Is this a good thing for college sports? Let’s start with you, Mike.

RILEY: Pat probably knows more about the inner workings of it, but it appears to me that the combination of NIL and the transfer portal is not good. You can transfer immediately, but the transfer oftentimes is motivated by NIL. That combination does away with any kind of equality in this thing. The big purse is gonna win. I understand it. You want loyalty from your players, but we are talking money — sometimes big money — and many of these kids come from nothing.

When I was coaching at Oregon State, I loved the idea of recruiting a high school kid, redshirting him, developing him and watching him grow. We were cyclical with our season records, but when I had an older team that had been in the program, especially with an older quarterback who had been in the program for three or four years, we were at our best. I liked that whole process. Now it is so different. You go through two or three years of development of players, and then the results take place somewhere else.

CASEY: Mike and I grew up in a time where you actually earned something. If you wanted something, you earned it. This is a reaction to the NCAA, which created discrimination against non-head count (full scholarship) sports. Why was a female soccer player, or track and field athlete, or golfer not allowed to have free meals, training table and full scholarships?  Every student-athlete in every sport should have the same nutritional and educational opportunities. People questioned why minorities didn’t play baseball. A lot of times it was because they couldn’t get a full scholarship.

The NCAA created a problem they couldn’t control. Then they followed recent society’s philosophy — let’s give them something they haven’t earned. That has created a huge problem. Now you have athletes making decisions based not on where they are going to develop, but where they can receive the most money. That is not a good thing. But I do think every athlete who goes to a Division I school should have a full ride, should have money for getting home and for incidentals through some type of revenue-sharing.

Most Division I athletic departments are in the red. Who pays for these scholarships?

CASEY: I can’t tell you who will pay for them. I can just tell you that if the NCAA wants equality, they need to make sure every student-athlete has the same opportunities. It is the same thing with NIL. You have implemented revenue-sharing at $20 1/2 million (per school, per year). Who is going to pay for that? If you can find money to fund scholarships and build tremendous facilities, you can fund-raise to cover scholarships for all student-athletes. I believe you could find a lot of people who, if asked to sponsor a student-athlete’s scholarship, would want to do that, knowing they are helping further the education of someone.

I have no issue with football and basketball getting what they get, but when you start eliminating (non-revenue) sports from who can have a scholarship and training table and things, that is discrimination. I can’t give you the answer who is going to fund them, but that has to be a priority if they really want equality.Title IX was designed to give women opportunities. It was a great thing. But it shouldn’t result in the elimination of other sports.

Full scholarship student-athletes are getting their education paid for. Four years at a Division I school could be worth in the neighborhood of $500,000. Then there are monthly stipends through the academic year. At Oregon State, full-scholarship athletes get a check for about $1,900 a month.

CASEY: But most athletes in non-revenue sports aren’t on full rides. Why can’t a soccer, or volleyball, or softball, or baseball player or wrestler have a full scholarship, or access to training table? It is money that drives the NCAA. Unfortunately, some decisions have been made that haven’t been good for athletes.

If you want to see production, give somebody something he has to earn. Who can blame a 19-year-old kid who says, “I am being offered $300,000 to play at School A and $200,000 at School B. I will take School A. And yet it might not be the right place or the right experience or the right coach for that young person.

Pat referenced the “House vs. NCAA settlement” in June, which limits each school to $20.5 million of NIL funding annually. It also calls for a clearinghouse (Deloitte) to analyze endorsements, partnerships and branding deals for any payouts of $600 or more. Can that work?

RILEY: It seems like it would be really hard to monitor something like that. When this first started with the O’Bannon case (filed in 2011), I thought the players were not getting compensated enough. We had players on full scholarship who didn’t have money to eat during the summer. We didn’t have the dining hall open at that time. If they had have gotten ahead of it and done what was fair, the whole idea of revenue-sharing might be different.

You remember when Quizz Rodgers’ No. 8 jersey was sold at the OSU Bookstore? My idea of NIL was, he should get a piece of the pie. He should get paid for that. But now, all of a sudden, it just turned into salary.

And there is no salary cap. Case?

Casey: The student-athletes won the ability to use their name, image and likeness to make money. Now the NCAA tells you they will provide a clearinghouse, where they will vet whether the student-athletes are worth the money they are getting. I would like to know who at the NCAA is going to determine that Jimmy Smith is not worth what Jones Chevrolet says he is worth to sign autographs at the dealership on the weekend, or to do a radio spot for them. If (Jones Chevrolet) say it is $300,000, and the NCAA comes back and says, no, it is only worth $25,000, they are going to get sued. The NCAA wants the student-athlete to go out and do his own deal. Now you are telling me that (the NCAA) is going to tell him what it is worth? Because the kid is going to say, “I think I am going to be a first-round draft pick. You are determining now that I’m not?”

I believe the NCAA is trying to get back all the control they have lost by being driven by the money they were making, and now it is a runaway train. Look, there are great people at the NCAA, too. I’m not suggesting there aren’t people there who want to do it right. I’m just saying, if you look at it from a coach’s point, the student-athletes have won the right to be paid, to market themselves. Who is to determine they are not worth that?

One of the things the House settlement did was to establish roster limits on each sport. In football, teams can now offer 105 scholarships for 105 roster spots. Baseball’s rosters are cut from 42 to 34, but scholarships can go up from 11.7 to 34.

RILEY: I hated to see the roster size set, although the 105 is what we lived with forever (including 20 walk-ons), and that is enough players, for sure. Will everybody be able to fund 105 scholarships? Absolutely not. It is the same with the $20.5 million cap on NIL. Not everybody is going to be able to pay that. I have thought from a long time ago, some day there is going to be a football super conference.

Are you thinking 40 or 50 schools?

RILEY: Or maybe a little less. You could have almost an NFL-sized conference just for football.

What happens to the other Power 4 programs in that scenario?

RILEY: It would still be major college football, but under different guidelines and in a whole different set of circumstances about playoffs. There are different levels right now. You might be seeing another level. I guess it would be having the rest of them continue on and function with the money they can afford.

CASEY: As far as roster limits, I would have loved it. In baseball, who needs more than 34 players? I hated cutting guys. Now some schools can’t go out and load up 50 good players and keep them from other programs. In baseball, if you use 10 pitchers and 15 players, that’s 25. And you have nine extra players. You give me 34 players, that’s enough.

RILEY: It’s different at the lower levels. When I was at Linfield coaching under Ad Rutschman in the late ’70s and early ‘80s, he wouldn’t cut anybody. We would have about 150 kids. I was coaching defensive backs, and I would have 25 guys in my position group.

And you knew 18 of them weren’t going to play.

RILEY: But a beautiful part of it was how many guys stayed in the program, and by the time they were seniors, a lot of them got to play. They had gained size and experience and learned our system, and they had stayed with it. Ad made sure you coached every kid. That’s why we practiced for three hours every day (laughs).

CASEY: That’s the difference from the Division I level. You have practice limitations on time. I can tell you, I wasn’t doing justice to the No. 45 on our roster in baseball. If you have 20 pitchers, how do you control that if you only have 20 hours to practice and lift weights a week?

The rosters limits would seem to eliminate opportunities for walk-ons, or at least greatly reduce them.

CASEY: When I coached at George Fox, which was NAIA, a kid would hang around for four years. We were able to do that at Oregon State, too. We could not have won the 2018 national championship without (Steven) Kwan and Larnach and Rutschman and (Nick) Madrigal. We also couldn’t have won it without the guys who started as walk-ons, like Jack Anderson and Kyle Nobach and Zach Taylor. They stayed. They served their time. And they filled key roles.

RILEY: Mike Hass was a walk-on. Would he have been one of the 105 scholarship players today as a true freshman? I don’t think so. He wasn’t even recruited by Portland State. Mike Remmers was a skinny kid out of Jesuit. Jay Locey talked me into letting him walk on. He started for us for four years and played 10 years in the NFL.

CASEY: One of the things that has been hard for institutions over the years is to balance out Title IX, to be roughly equal with budgets and scholarships given out to men and women. There was no women’s football. If you could remove football from the equation, you could have balanced the budgets of the sports. But how do you make up for 85 scholarships in football?

You start by giving 20 scholarship out for women’s crew, none for the men. I’m not sure if it’s the case today, but that’s the way it was at Oregon State a few years ago.

CASEY: Most athletic departments don’t make money. I’m wondering, if student-athletes are going to share in the revenue, are they also going to share in the losses?

Mike, your last year coaching college football was 2017. Pat, your last year was 2018. How would you feel about coaching college ball these days?

RILEY: I’m unsure of how I would go about it. I wouldn’t have liked to deal with the transfer portal. I like to have guys, develop them, see them year to year. That’s the way they can become their best self and our team can become the best. That’s a pipe dream today, probably. I would not enjoy being involved with the (distribution of) money. Athletic departments have added employees to handle NIL and transfer portal stuff, but coaches have to at least know what is going on. It’s a different world.

CASEY: People who just got started in coaching have some stuff thrown at them that we didn’t have. On one hand, the resources they have now are incredible. The facilities are so much better than when I started. Now they have a new challenge — the portal and NIL. Every era presents its own problems, and you figure out how to make it work.

One of the things I enjoyed most in coaching was to see a young man come in, and for us to present a challenge for him to become a player at our level. If he doesn’t take that challenge because someone has convinced him it is easier to play somewhere else, then he never becomes the man he could have become.

Sports are a platform for your life. You can win a championship, but if you put out a bunch of individuals who aren’t productive people, good husbands, good fathers, good citizens, what good would that be? Mike talks about what a fulfilling thing it is to be around his grandson. There are things in life that should be difficult. If you want to reap the rewards, don’t try to fix all the problems on the journey or you will ruin the destination.

Oregon State begins play in all sports in the re-figured Pac-12 beginning the fall of 2026. What is the future of the Pac-12, and of Oregon State in particular, in all of this? Mike, even though the level of play may be a step down from when the Beavers were in the old Pac-12, you don’t think it will be all bad.

RILEY: Everybody can take a deep breath. As time goes on, there becomes a new normal. It is going to be a very competitive league. We already know the San Diego States, Boise States and Fresno States are good. One year not long ago, the Mountain West had a winning record against the Pac-10. The schools coming in (besides OSU and Washington State) have good teams in other sports, too. It will be different, but it could level off into what will be a good product.

Will the fans adjust?

RILEY: That’s a great question. I like the people involved with the program. They know what they are doing. There is a high level of expertise there. Oregon State fans are really good fans. They love their school; they love their team. For me, it will be different. I will miss some of those rivalries. When we had the Pac-10 was the best — nine conference games (a season), round-robin, home and home every other year. I looked forward to going to Strawberry Canyon and into the Palouse to play.

Pat said it right about coaching. Maybe fans have to take note of it, too. They have to adjust to the world we’re in. People might not like the things that are going on, but the coaches are living it. Those guys have to adjust and have a plan and use their money effectively. That’s their world. They are in the middle of it. Whether it is good or bad, the coaches can’t spend time worrying about that. They have to go to work.

Pat, what about baseball? Mitch Canham has one more season of being an independent before beginning conference play. How is that working out?

CASEY: This past season proved the strength of the program. To play an independent schedule and go to the World Series is pretty impressive. The depth of the program, the cache, is stable.

I am more concerned that the state of college baseball on the West Coast isn’t what it used to be. On most campuses, there are not a lot of people going to games. At Oregon State, it is fantastic, but when I started coaching, you would have nice crowds at places like Stanford, USC and Arizona State. It was a priority. Unfortunately, at a lot of schools, the fan base has lost interest. Why, I don’t know. My fear for college baseball is, there are not a lot of programs or institutions where baseball is a priority.

How about a final comment from both of you on the state of college sports today.

CASEY: College athletics is an amazing forum for education. There is incredible coaching and teaching that goes far beyond what people think. Our biggest challenge is not teaching the game.That is not that difficult to do. But coaching the kid? Really difficult to do. You teach the game; you coach the kid. If you don’t know what motivates Johnny Smith, I don’t care how great the Xs and Os are, you may never get him to the level to perform. The more that piece is taken out of the hands of coaching, the more difficult it will be for athletics to continue to grow.

If I am 18 years old today, I am confused. No longer do I make a decision on where I go based upon where I am going to excel in the social piece. Nobody (physically) goes to school anymore. They take most of their classes on-line. Kids are making their college decision on NIL money. Mike Riley is a great coach, but let’s go to another school with a first-year coach that is offering more money and has never proved anything. I am worried about the student-athlete making decisions based on those circumstances.

Why wouldn’t some (baseball) coach come out and say, “I’m not going to buy your son. We have $25,000 to give to Junior, but the other $25,000 is going to be invested, and your son will sit down and learn how to manage money. When you leave here, that money is yours. Your son will leave with hopefully $200,000 that will help start his adult life.” Bottom line: If you give him the other $25,000 now, he’ll spend it on something that in five years is worth very little.

RILEY: I am worried about the discrepancies with what one school has to offer as compared to the others, both from team to team in your conference and then against schools nationally. It appears that NIL funding is bigger than ever, what some schools have at their disposal. When I was coaching at Oregon State, I loved to recruit because I believed in the place and what it could offer, including the education, and because I knew what our program had in store for that kid. I was totally confident this was going to be good for him in his overall development as a player, as a student and as a person. I knew it was going to be good.

I am not sure if that talk would amount to much in recruiting today. I had a conversation the other day with a coach at Oregon State. I asked how recruiting was going. “OK,” he said. “It’s more of a business transaction anymore.” That is sad, and kind of scary.

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