Hail, hail … To hail with Old OSU.

That’s what the Pac-12 said last year.

Jonathan Smith and Damien Martinez, too.

Three-quarters of an Elite Eight women’s basketball team. The two leading scorers from the men’s team.

And as much as that all stunk and stung, it at least gave Beaver Bereavers something to rally around. A common cause. It was what they had, so they wore it as a badge of honor. Alums wallowed with pride.

So what are those folks to do now that an ally from up north wants to come and take that, too?

Cougs, oh, Cougs.

It is a sort of win, I suppose, that the Beavers can no longer lay claim to the saddest-sack university in the Pacific Northwest.

Washington State, how we know thy pain.

Misery loves company, you know, and for the last year-plus, Washington State has shared in some of the Beavers‘ torment, but not all.

Yeah, the Cougs also got told to kick rocks by major college athletics. And yeah, Pat Chun did Wazzu hella dirty when he traded in his Cougar Gold for Husky Purple.

OK, and the Cougs star quarterback went and became a Heisman finalist somewhere else.

And the basketball coach who led Wazzu to an NCAA Tournament win for the first time since it was still the Pac-10 bolted for Stanford.

Crimson Misdemeanors, I say. Ya win some, Palouse some.

Because somehow not even those events — all of them — added up to as rotten of a year as what went down in Corvallis.

The Cougars’ salvation, as backwards as it may seem, was that their football team struggled just enough in 2023 that nobody tried to hire Jake Dickert, giving WSU the temporary high that comes with short-term continuity.

But now?

Dickert has decamped to Wake Forest, of all places. Both coordinators left for power conference jobs last week, as did the quarterbacks coach. The Cougars are bleeding players via the transfer portal. A million-dollar NIL deal wasn’t enough to keep quarterback John Mateer in Pullman.

On “College GameDay” on Saturday at Notre Dame, Ol’ Crimson may just fly at half mast.

Dickert’s departure, like Smith’s escape to Michigan State, is a sobering reminder of how stacked the deck is against the Upper Left Behind.

Beavers fans would say they don’t need any more reminders, thank you very much. But Dickert stood in front of a microphone this week and said Mateer moving on and, presumably, moving up “proves once again that our process is working.”

And that college football “is in a little bit of a weird place” but “as Cougs, I’m really proud that we’ll continue to adapt.”

Will we, Jake?

At this point, I don’t really begrudge a coach for moving on. Players, either. But it’s a worrisome trend for Oregon State and Washington State that they are unable to retain talent wherever that talent is. These are two schools clawing for stability in a world that is working against them.

And, yes, I do think Washington State’s football predicament is more perilous than what OSU endured last November. The transfer portal opened on Dec. 9. Signing day was five days before that. The Cougs find themselves in a similar position to Marshall, which withdrew from its bowl game after losing its coach and many of its players.

The Cougars have a date with Syracuse in the Holiday Bowl. We think.

At least at Oregon State, Trent Bray was quickly elevated to head coach and had a puncher’s chance of retaining players and finding new ones. With the top members of the staff all gone, Washington State will almost certainly have to look outside the program and conduct a search. By the time AD Anne McCoy can identify and hire a replacement, the portal pickings may be slim.

The reality is that both WSU and OSU were difficult places to coach when they had the benefit of playing in the Pac-12 — and not just a makeshift conference that bears its name and is still two years away.

It’s made even more challenging by the pending arrival of revenue sharing for players, which will only widen the gap further between the haves and the have-nots.

The Cougars and Beavers have quickly been relegated to have-nots, in case that wasn’t clear.

What we have learned from coaches and players at both schools over the past year is that the hardship brought on by realignment makes for a convenient rallying cry, but is not actually a fight worth sticking around to fight.

If anything, Oregon State is a year further along in the healing process than the Cougars are. Bray has had a year to install his system and sell his vision. You can quibble with the results in his first year, but the waters have at least calmed ever-so-slightly in Corvallis.

That’s mostly because the damage has mostly been done.

There’s nothing left that could hurt the Beavers more than they’ve already been hurt.

Now, the men’s basketball team is stacking up nonconference wins. Olympic gymnast Jade Carey is back for her senior season. Baseball is right around the corner.

Last year, Washington State got a taste of what realignment can do to a school, but is now getting the full experience.

Who knows how weird things can get?

First, they need to hire a football coach. Hey, Nick Rolovich is available.

Just kidding.

He took a job in the ACC, too.

— Bill Oram is the sports columnist at The Oregonian/OregonLive.