Pullman knew Jim Walden as more than a coach. It knew him as the man who gave Washington State football its belief, the loud, funny, relentless presence who made an underdog program sound like a place that belonged on the same field as anyone. Walden died on July 2, 2026, at age 88, and for the Cougars, the loss reached beyond the sideline. He had been their coach, their broadcaster, and, for decades, the voice that kept insisting the program mattered.

Walden was born and raised in Aberdeen, Mississippi, and his path to the Pacific Northwest began far from the Palouse. He played quarterback at Itawamba Junior College before transferring to the University of Wyoming, where he led the Cowboys to back-to-back Skyline Conference championships in 1958 and 1959. In 1959, he was named Skyline Conference Player of the Year and earned Honorable Mention All-America honors, the kind of recognition that marked him early as a quarterback with command and nerve. He was drafted by both the Cleveland Browns and the Denver Broncos in 1960, but chose the Canadian Football League instead, spending three seasons with the BC Lions, Calgary Stampeders and Edmonton Eskimos.

His coaching life began in Mississippi, at Amory High School, where he spent five years as head coach before moving into the college game. He later served under Bob Devaney at Nebraska, helping contribute to the Cornhuskers’ 1970 and 1971 national championship teams, and then spent four seasons at Miami as both offensive backfield coach and defensive coordinator. By the time he joined Washington State as an assistant in 1977 and was promoted to head coach the next year, he had already seen the sport from enough angles to know that belief was not a slogan. It was a practice.

At Washington State, that practice became the point. In 1981, Walden led the Cougars to the Holiday Bowl, ending a 50-year postseason drought and giving Pullman a breakthrough it had waited generations to see. He was named Pac-10 Coach of the Year that season, then again in 1983, but the award only partly captured what he had done. He had made a program that had spent too long looking up start believing it could look straight ahead.

The 1982 season sharpened that legacy. Walden was instrumental in bringing the Apple Cup back to Pullman after nearly 30 years in Spokane, and the game itself turned into one of the defining wins of his tenure. Washington State beat No. 5 Washington 24-20, ending an eight-game losing streak to the Huskies and giving the rivalry a night that still belonged to the Cougars. Walden understood the weight of that game better than most. “Nothing in my job, not the Rose Bowls, not the Holiday Bowls, nothing is more important than beating the University of Washington,” he said. That was not bluster. It was a map of the place.

He also understood the theater around the rivalry, and he played his part with a grin. Don James once called himself, “I’m a 2,000-word underdog,” and Walden, who lived comfortably in the long exchange between coach and press, fit that world perfectly. “I can’t define it, I can’t tell someone who isn’t a cougar what it’s like. There’s something that happens at Washington State,” he said, and the line carried the same mix of pride and mischief that made him such a durable figure in the region. Dan Weaver later summed up the man behind the quotes this way: “He never really lost a game. He just ran out of words.”

Walden left Washington State in 1987 for Iowa State, where he coached for eight seasons and kept finding ways to make the improbable feel possible. In 1989, his team finished 6-5 despite having only 50 players on scholarship because of NCAA sanctions. In 1992, he guided Iowa State to a major upset of No. 7 Nebraska at Jack Trice Stadium, another reminder that his teams could still punch above their weight when the odds said otherwise. The details changed from Pullman to Ames, but the theme did not. Walden was at his best when the room expected less.

After retiring from coaching in 1994, he returned to Washington State in another role, spending 11 seasons as a radio color commentator for Cougars broadcasts. It was a second act that suited him. He had spent a career talking football with conviction, and now he did it for the people who had lived through the same Saturdays. In 2009, Washington State inducted him into its Athletic Hall of Fame, and in 2011 Wyoming did the same, formal recognition for a career that had already been written into the memory of two fan bases.

Jon Haarlow, Washington State’s athletic director, said Walden “will forever be remembered as a great Coug who deeply loved Washington State.” That was true, but it still undersells the scale of what he meant. Walden was a Mississippi-born quarterback who became a fixture of the Pacific Northwest, a coach who turned underdog football into a shared language, and a broadcaster who kept speaking that language long after the games ended. He is survived by his wife, Nancy. For Washington State, he was not just part of the story. He was the reason so many people believed the story could be bigger than the record book said it should be.