Bill Oram: It was fight or flight for new Beavers coach Trent Bray, whose sense of loyalty kept him at Oregon State

You might imagine Jonathan Smith’s pitch on Saturday morning went something like that. Or maybe not. But either way, when Smith tried to take his star defensive coordinator with him to Michigan State, Trent Bray felt a pull in the opposite direction.

It was, quite literally, fight or flight.

“There was an obligation,” Bray told me on Wednesday. “To these players, to this university, to a place I care deeply about.”

So let it be said on the first day of Bray’s tenure as Oregon State ’s 32nd head football coach, that while Smith sought safe harbor in the face of the Beavers coming unmoored from their historic conference affiliation, Bray doubled down.

In his alma mater’s hour of need, Bray ran into the fire.

Smith’s disappearing act?

“It didn’t sit quite right with me,” Bray said in his introductory news conference, “which is why I wasn’t in a hurry to get on the plane.”

That will galvanize a fanbase that feels jilted by Smith’s exit. It will draw cheers from players who felt that Smith did not live up to his own demand of them: that they lock in for the season and block out external pressures and distractions.

While Smith was introduced to great fanfare on Tuesday, with a marching band salute, Bray’s introduction carried decidedly fewer frills. It took place in the Beavers’ traditional news conference room. Absent were the cheerleaders and brass section. His parents sat in the front row.

The message? No time for balloons and punch. The Beavers have work to do.

When Bray and I spoke in the atrium of the Valley Football Center, he wanted to clarify his “didn’t sit quite right” remark.

“For me,” he said, “it was leaving at this time, not Coach Smith. It was more it didn’t sit right with leaving in this time.”

Maybe that makes it somewhat less spicy of a quote. Less of a shot across the bow at his predecessor. But it doesn’t change the message Bray is sending to his players, boosters or the fanbase.

He can sell all of them on him rising to the challenge. On the sense of duty he felt to his alma mater.

It’s a message that is going to resonate for the embattled Beavers and their fans, who will find some of themselves in Bray.

Like Smith, Bray is a Beavers football legend.

Smith was the Fiesta Bowl MVP in 2001. Bray won the defensive honor in the 2004 Insight Bowl. Both of them, funny enough, earned the hardware with wins over Notre Dame.

Bray still ranks sixth at Oregon State in tackles.

But he’s never had to wrap his arms around something quite as enormous as this job in this moment.

He will have to replace much of the previous coaching staff. Players will have the opportunity to follow Smith out the door and transfer.

“I’m always up for a new challenge,” Bray said. “This was a great opportunity at a new challenge in a familiar place with people that I care about surrounding me, so I thought it was a great situation.”

When he was asked last year about pursuing head coaching jobs, Bray made it clear he didn’t think it was for him. On Wednesday, he revised to say he was only interested in being a head coach at Oregon State.

The paycheck doesn’t hurt.

But after Smith met with the team the morning after they’d been pasted by the Ducks, 31-7, Scott Barnes, Oregon State’s athletic director, pulled Bray aside.

“He asked me to look at this thing and sit down and think about it,” Bray said.

The Beavers’ defensive coordinator was in-demand. There was, in fact, a jet waiting and a seat for him. He probably would have looked just fine in green. And if it wasn’t Michigan State, Bray would have had other Power Five suitors. USC buzz was rampant.

But Bray spent the day reflecting on his future. On what he wanted for his career. On the way realignment had chewed up the college landscape and spit out Oregon State and Washington State, one his alma mater and the other his hometown university.

“As an alumni, but also someone that’s been in this conference for a long time,” Bray said, “to see it be destroyed in the way that it was by corporations and greed, it was sad.”

So he asked himself: Did he want to take on the challenge?

“The more I talked to (Barnes),” Bray said, “the more I looked at the plan for the future, the more I felt great about keeping this thing going here.”

We will need to see that plan soon.

The Beavers plan to have five Power Five opponents next season, and a slew of Mountain West opponents to fill out the schedule. Both Bray and Barnes described a future where Oregon State has a clearer path to the College Football Playoff than ever.

And when it expands to 12 teams next season, that is potentially true.

But by investing in Oregon State, Bray has the opportunity to be the folk hero that Beavers fans wanted Smith to be.

The wounds are fresh from Smith’s departure. His remark upon landing in East Lansing on that Bray-less jet about having known for a “long time” that Michigan State was the right place for him was ill-considered, to put it mildly.

“He’s trying to do his best job at Michigan State and make them excited about him,” Bray told me, “which they should be.”

But there is excitement again at Oregon State, too. That’s something that didn’t feel possible just days ago, when the jet carrying Smith disappeared into the sky over Corvallis, with at least one empty seat.

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