Thank you, Jim Sterk. Thank you.

Thousands of people wrote in, and Sterk listened. The Apple Cup is not being sold, and will be played in Pullman every other year. Money is still a problem for WSU’s athletic program, but I’m glad that ruining the Apple Cup isn’t the solution they went with.

Thank goodness. Between our biggest rivalry game staying put, and Ken Bone seemingly holding onto the incoming recruiting class that had initially committed while Tony Bennett was still our coach, a couple of potentially disastrous weeks for Cougar athletics don’t seem so bad now.

If the Apple Cup is really being moved to Qwest Field every year, it’s a dark day for WSU athletics…

If Tony Bennett leaving Pullman wasn’t bad enough, now the Apple Cup is leaving Pullman too? The single biggest athletic event of the WSU calendar, no matter how good or bad our football team is?

Years ago, Rick Neuheisel, the snake who represented the University of Washington’s football program with remarkable accuracy, suggested this very thing. He suggested we play the game every year in a “neutral site” about 5 miles from their home stadium. Mike Price correctly laughed at it from our side, and the suggestion was dismissed.

Good day in sports.

I like the Cougars’ hire of Ken Bone as the next basketball coach. A guy with northwest ties, who probably already knows some of WSU’s recruits for this coming year, and has had success at Portland State…this was as good of a pick as we could hope for, I think. The next step is to keep our recruits in the fold, and especially to keep our freshmen like Klay Thompson and DeAngelo Casto from skipping town, but I’m glad that Jim Sterk acted quickly and decisively in getting us what appears to be a good pick for coach. Again, it’s imperative that we win pretty soon under Bone and keep the positive trend going in Cougar hoops.

The Mariners win on opening day, Griffey goes yard…that was nice. We should obviously be expecting to win when we throw Felix Hernandez against a subpar offense like Minnesota’s, but I’m happy about it regardless. If we’re going to see much success this year, it’s going to have to be on the backs of some great pitching by both Felix and Bedard, so here’s hoping that Bedard has a good outing tomorrow night.

Tony Bennett gone…

…absolutely devastating. The Cougs have some good young talent, and they’d better make a very good hire for next head coach, or this little run under Tony will be a forgotten footnote in a few years.

Best of luck to Tony in Virginia. Really surprised that UVA is the greener pasture he chose to bolt for after holding out from joining Indiana in the Big Ten last year, but so be it, I don’t hate the guy for moving on. He and his father made us relevant again, if only for a short time. Really disappointed that his time at Wazzu is already over, though.

This is the worst sports news I’ve received since the Sonics’ move to Oklahoma was made official.

4 Apple Cup wins in 5 years…fantastic.

Yes, the Washington State Cougars are an awful, awful team. Happily, and I didn’t believe it all season until this moment, the Huskies are even worse.

I had given up all hope, I mentioned in passing in an e-mail to my mom that “it looks like a loss this year,” but then Kevin Lopina completed a miracle pass to Jared Karstetter, Nico Grasu converted the field goal, and suddenly we were in overtime. Overtime was incredibly dramatic; the defense showed some guts, kept the Huskies out of the end zone, and this thing was decided by the fact that we had a better kicker than them.

It wasn’t the highest level of quality football, but it was drama, excitement, entertainment, intensity…everything we love in sports. I was as excited as the winning field goal was knocked through as I am when my team wins a playoff game. For today anyway, I can forget that my team is an awful 2-10 team…we just won the Apple Cup, and will finish up with a better season than the Huskies for the 8th straight year. I’m a happy man.

Blah…Gary Rogers out for the season.

WSU quarterback Gary Rogers is out for the season due to a fracture he suffered in yesterday’s game. That’s really a rough turn of events. In the short-term, I don’t think it’ll make the Cougs any worse really, I was advocating benching him in favor of letting one of the younger guys develop, and I still would be if he was healthy…but I feel bad for the kid.

WSU-Baylor game moved to Friday night.

Unfortunately, Hurricane Ike has caused havoc down in Texas, and WSU’s game at Baylor, originally scheduled to be played Saturday morning (and on national TV) is now being played on Friday night at 5:30 PT. Doesn’t sound promising to get a TV broadcast. As I’ll be attending my alma mater high school’s football game, I guess I’m going to be out of luck in following much of this one at all.

The Cougar team is still leaving town tomorrow morning, the day of the game, for a seven hour flight to Waco. That certainly sounds like a recipe for failure…seven hours of travel, then a few hours later they play a football game?

With this new development affecting the logistics of the game, I’m going to change my pick for this weekend and unfortunately call it a Baylor win; hopefully I’m lending too much weight to the fatigue level of the team after a relatively long flight, but in a game I thought they were going to struggle to win anyway, it tips the scale the other way I think. Bad break all the way around.

UPDATE: Well, I guess changing my pick was correct, though I can hardly point to the crappy logistics as being the primary reason we kicked around by freaking Baylor…

NCAA Week 1 Thoughts

Cougs

Well, the Cougars appear to be really bad. I don’t want to overreact to one game or anything, but it just didn’t look like there was much good to say about the offensive side of the football, and the special teams were atrocious. I do think the defense acquitted themselves reasonably well, they kept the team in the game for as long as possible while the special teams were routinely giving up awful field position and the offense was quickly leaving the field to make sure that the defense never got rested…of course they were going to eventually give up some points when put in such a bad spot.

I fully expect a loss to Cal next week. After that, we get one very winnable game at Baylor, followed by a very likely win against Div. I-AA Portland State, so we’ve still got a good chance to be 2-2 after four games, but if they haven’t really seriously figured some things out by the end of that fourth game, it’s going to get ugly after that. My hope for the team is the same as it was at the beginning of the day…show marked improvement over the course of the season, and win the Apple Cup. If they do those things, I’ll be satisfied. I couldn’t very well expect Coach Wulff to pull out an immediate miracle before his own recruits have gotten a chance to make any impact at all.

ACC
The picture wasn’t pretty at all in the ACC.

Time for Coach Wulff to set the tone.

PULLMAN — Pullman Police submitted documents to the Whitman County prosecutor Monday requesting that Washington State football player Andy Roof be charged with one count of second-degree felony assault and five counts of fourth-degree gross misdemeanor assault.

Police Sgt. Daniel Dornes said an investigation determined that Roof punched or shoved six people April 26 on the WSU campus. One of the alleged victims suffered facial fractures that resulted in the felony charge.

Dornes said the prosecutor’s office could make a decision on filing charges within two weeks. A summer trial is possible, Dornes said, depending on court schedules.

Police allege Roof was under the influence of alcohol, although no blood-alcohol test was administered before or during the several hours Roof spent in jail.

Roof, who would be a fifth-year senior this fall, sat out last season after being suspended from school for three incidents involving alcohol. A former starting offensive lineman, Roof was listed as a second-string defensive tackle this spring.

Link

Tony Bennett gets another well-deserved raise.

I think that Husky fans are going to have to come up with a better line than, “Just wait until Tony Bennett leaves.”

I think it’s fairly obvious by now that Tony likes it at WSU. Earlier in the offseason, he turned down an offer to become the head coach at Indiana. This offer was believed to be in the ballpark of $2.5 million, while his 2007-08 salary at Washington State was a mere $800,000. Cougar athletics did the right (and smart) thing yesterday, restructuring Bennett’s contract and giving him a raise that puts him at $1 million a year now. The contract was also extended by an additional year, through 2015.

Congratulations to Husky killer Alex Brink.

One name I was not expecting to see drafted yesterday was longtime WSU Cougar starting quarterback Alex Brink…but at pick #223, midway through the final round of the draft, the Houston Texans made him their final draft choice.

Brink celebrating the winning touchdown pass in the 2007 Apple Cup

Good news: Glenn Johnson released from hospital, will be fine.

Pullman Mayor Glenn Johnson has been released from the hospital after being admitted with stroke-like symptoms Sunday.

City Supervisor John Sherman said Johnson, 64, was released from Pullman Regional Hospital late afternoon Monday and is recovering at home.

Link

Good, good. Cougar athletics would not be the same without Glenn Johnson.

Hoping for a full recovery for the voice of the Cougs…

PULLMAN — Pullman Mayor Glenn Johnson is said to be recovering nicely from a spike in blood pressure that he suffered overnight Sunday.

It was initially reported that Johnson had possibly had a stroke, but the incident turned out to be less severe than initially feared.

Johnson has shown considerable improvement in the hours since the incident and will be monitored throughout the day, according to an official at City Hall. He remained in ICU at Gritman Medical Center in Moscow Monday morning, but the official – an administrative assistant in Johnson’s office – said the mayor will be transported to a Spokane hospital for further treatment and testing.

Link

Johnson (left) with Cougar hoops coach Tony Bennett