“When you go to Washington State, you learn to live with disappointment.”
– Don James, former Washington football coach
In the Quarterfinal of the
And while the Good Gals season was coming to an end with yet another loss to Stanford, over on the men’s side of things, the Cougars managed an upset victory over UCLA at home that same week. The Cougars had lost 19 straight to UCLA at home prior to that, a skid which was absolutely confounding – while there have been up-and-down times on the hardwood in Pullman, during that period the Cougars have generally been pretty good, making 3 NCAA tournament appearances and even reaching the Sweet 16 in 2008. They just couldn’t win.
As bad as that skid was, it pales in comparison to one of the more remarkable skids in school history – having lost the first 47 times they played UCLA in Los Angeles. 47 times! Now, granted, UCLA won 11 national titles during that stretch, but the Cougars have generally been competitive on the hardwood over the years. The streak took on a life of its own after a while, as the Cougars would often times put up great showings at Pauley Pavilion, only to lose by 1, or by 2, or in OT, or do something absurd like blow a 23-pt. lead in the final 7:30 of the game. When they finally broke through and won at Pauley, head coach Dick Bennett probably could have run for mayor. The record against the Bruins in L.A. is now 2-54, if you’re keeping track. (And when you’re 2-54, you almost cannot help but keep track.) Dick Bennett also managed to rid the school of another box of Kryptonite as well in his 3-year tenure as head coach, a 38-game drought against Arizona that had dated back to mid-1980s.
But this is how it seems to go at Washington State, where losing is an art form taken to the extreme.
Buoyed by their win over the Bruins, the Cougars then played the dreaded Husky scum from the University of Washington in the first round of the Pac-12 tournament, and it was a game in which the Cougars got way behind, put on a furious rally, and wound up losing by 2 points, thus bringing an end to the season. This would go down as a good effort, were it not eerily similar to their 2-point loss at home to eventual #1 Gonzaga earlier in the year. Or eerily similar to 4-5 other games this year. In fact, come to think of it, I’ve been watching that exact same game for 30 YEARS NOW.
To give you some idea of my connection to that school, my father was a professor there for 25 years, and I basically grew up around that campus. I was taking classes there while I was in high school, and the campus was always a fabulous resource, be it the library or the gyms or as a source of summer employment. It’s actually a really outstanding institution with some top-class programs, most notably the journalism and communications departments – you take classes in the Edward R. Murrow Building for a reason. Famed sportscaster Keith “Whoa Nellie” Jackson is also an alum, and you pretty much cannot watch a local news telecast in the Western U.S. without seeing a W.S.U. grad somewhere on the screen. So even though I’m not technically an alumni, I feel more of a kinship to that university than some of the graduates. I’ve made it a point in the past to go to some of the Bay Area alumni gatherings for football games against either Stanford or Cal. An action which, of late, has been rather dismal and downright embarrassing and has grown decidedly unappealing.
The last time I did so was in 2008, in a downpour “down on the farm” and W.S.U. lost to Stanford 58-0. Considering that 2008 football team was the first team in NCAA history to give up 60+ points in a game four times in one season, 58-0 constituted improvement. With everything that I was saying before about the basketball program, it should be pointed out again that the basketball team has actually been pretty good most of the time. The footballers, meanwhile, are in the midst of a 5-year-run which has seen them go 12-49. A particular wretched stretch of bad football never seen at a school where bad football has been far too common over the history of the program.
“It was an autumn day made for football, if only WSU had played some. Cloudy and highs in the 60s. That's the outlook, respectively, for the Cougars and their opponents.”
– Bud Withers, Seattle Times
When things go bad at W.S.U., they really go bad. Before Dick Bennett arrived as the basketball coach, the program endured a four-year stretch where they went 9-63 in Pac-10 play. The women’s team hasn’t been worth a damn in about 20 years, and have put up a couple seasons where they accrued records like 2-25. It’s said at schools like UCLA that they never rebuild but simply reload. At W.S.U., rebuilding is a step-up from cratering, and the landscape of the athletic program has more craters than the moon.
W.S.U. faces some inherent disadvantages when it comes to competing on the playing field. Success in athletics requires procuring talent, first and foremost, and recruiting to the school is pretty damn difficult. Washington State University is barely within the state boundaries, located in the small town of Pullman some 270 miles east of Seattle and 8 miles from the Idaho border. Now, it’s not a bad place at all. It’s a nice college town, and with 30,000 college kids in the area it is always pretty lively. (The University of Idaho is located 8 miles away in the border town of Moscow. Maybe it was due to living in a town named for the Russian capital that U. of I. grad Sarah Palin got the idea she could see Russia from her house. But I digress.) But it is remote. It’s not for everyone. You have to enjoy the outdoors and enjoy a certainly easygoing pace of life.
And indeed, W.S.U. could go on beating on the Idaho Vandals and such seemingly at will if they chose. But instead, W.S.U. competes in the Pac-12, which is the single most successful athletic conference in history. (And I should point out that the school isn’t just competing for athletes, but also professors and students and money and everything else. College sports are the greatest fundraising and marketing tools a university has, which is a part of why they’ve perpetuated for all these years.) UCLA has won 100+ national titles alone. Stanford, Cal, and U.S.C. are consistently ranked among the top all-around athletic programs in the country. W.S.U. is basically competing against big city schools from California, Seattle, and Phoenix and, particularly in the case of the University of Nike down in Eugene, big MONEY schools as well. It’s just always going to be a struggle. It takes pretty determined coaches to make programs work at the university.
And, of course, there are better jobs available elsewhere for coaches which pay better and offer more prestige, so W.S.U. is almost always used as a stepping stone by coaches. This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course – I personally view coaches as the most selfish bunch of egomaniacs on the earth, almost all of whom spend more time caring about their bank balances more than anything else – but about the time a coach gets a program succeeding at a high level at W.S.U., bigger schools come with their chequebooks open. Because after all, if you can be successful at Washington State, you can probably be successful anywhere. So when things start going well with any particular club – for example, the men’s basketball team rising to prominence and reaching the Sweet 16 a few years ago – there is a certain inevitability that there will be a coaching change (in that case, Dick’s son Tony Bennett, who had taken over from his father, promptly bolted for Virginia) and that lack of continuity just adds to the problems.
[For some reason, W.S.U. seems to be a fertile ground for recruiting coaches to the state of Iowa. They lost a football coach to Iowa State, a basketball coach to Iowa, and also their most successful coach of their volleyball program moved on to Iowa as well, although she gave up coaching so as to watch her son play college basketball. And since it’s March Madness season, you might remember the kid because he likely busted your bracket in the office pool:
Yeah, that kid.]
With losing, however, comes humour, albeit gallows humour a lot of the time, and the Zzu Crew are a patient bunch who tend to take defeat in stride. Quirky places like Pullman also tend to attract some quirky people – thus the school has a long history of colourful characters who are quick with a quip and able to find comedy in almost any situation. (Don James of the Huskies used to complain that he was a “2,000 word underdog” when it came time for the Apple Cup press conferences.) One of whom, Jim Sweeney, died recently and suffered through an inglorious 26-59-1 stint over eight seasons as head football coach but always left them laughing, although his last game with the school was no laughing matter at the time.
This particular game in 1975 is (in)famous because the Cougars led 27-14 late in the fourth quarter over their hated rivals, the Husky scum from Washington, and they decided to run the score up a bit. Then this happened:
No Apple Cup ever had a wackier windup than the 1975 renewal at Husky Stadium. With 3:01 remaining, Washington State held a 27-14 lead and seemed on the verge of a significant upset. The 3-7 Cougars also had the ball on the UW 14-yard line, staring at fourth and one, and needed only a field goal to clinch the contest. WSU coach Jim Sweeney initially ordered a run, but his players wanted to pass. Sweeney, in what would become a classic blunder, reluctantly acquiesced. After the snap, WSU quarterback John Hopkins threw toward his tight end, but Washington’s Al Burleson stepped in front of him and intercepted the ball.
After two steps, Burleson was on his way to a 93-yard touchdown. After the Husky defense held, Washington got the ball back with 1:58 left and WSU clinging to a 27-21 lead. With the Huskies positioned deep in their own territory, UW quarterback Warren Moon, playing only because of an injury to starter Chris Rowland, launched a “here’s-hoping” bomb in the direction of wide receiver Spider Gaines, running free behind the Cougars’ secondary.
Moon badly underthrew the ball, and a trio of Cougar defenders converged at midfield to intercept it. But WSU’s midfield committee botched the job. The ball bounced off WSU’s Tony Heath and ricocheted into the arms of Gaines, who ran into the end zone for a 78-yard touchdown. Steve Robbins’ extra point gave the Huskies an improbable 28-27 victory, which led to Sweeney’s resignation.
– Sports Press Northwest
"When we scored 52 and beat Washington (in 1973), they gave me a lifetime contract. After that (1975) game, they had me declared dead."
– Jim Sweeney
This game did more to cement a notion which has become common vernacular in the Pacific Northwest – the verb “To Coug,” which means to blow a game when victory is almost certain, and usually in the most incomprehensible fashion imaginable. The phrase itself became infamous after this game, when aghast Spokesman-Review columnist John Blanchette penned a column in response to yet another absurd loss in a lost season. (The key play in that game is at the 25:53 mark of the video, where WSU recovers an Arizona St. fumble on the 4-yd. line, only to have to wiped out due to having 12 men on the field.) He said in that column that he was looking for: "a word, a phrase, even, to sum up this misbegotten football season at Washington State University. To Coug. Verb intransitive."
It’s this aspect which drives fans crazy. Because while it’s one thing to just be lousy, and lose repeatedly in contests where success seems scantly possible, what’s even more crazymaking is constant underachievement. Losing is still losing, of course – the desired final result having not been achieved – but it is the ways in which losing occurs that come to define you over time.
And regardless of the talent level on the field or on the court, Washington State somehow seems to screw it up in the end. For years, W.S.U. had one of the most dominant track & field programs in the country, a program that churned out future world record holders and Olympic medalists. Yet every year, come time for the NCAA championships – the one meet that mattered the most – the Cougars would finish 2nd or 3rd, unable to live up to billing as meet favorites. I watched an astonishing number of football games in the 1980s in which talent-laden squads would lose do stuff like gain 675 yards in a game and lose because they turned the ball over 7 times. The level of talent and aptitude on the team seems simply to raise the magnitude of the implosion, in the end. Every year bracketeers look at the NCAA tourney and say “look for an upset on the 5-12 line.” Well, W.S.U. was the original 5-12 upset in 1980, when one of the best teams in school history lost to 12th-seeded Penn in the first round of the newly-expanded tourney. (And this was a 48-team field, mind you, so losing to a 12 back then was particularly embarrassing.) One of the school’s biggest sporting achievements of all-time – reaching the Final Four in 1941 – also led to a rather ignoble record – Worst Shooting Pct. in the NCAA Championship Game – that lasted for nearly 70 years (until that masonry display by Butler vs. Connecticut a few years ago).
The school's athletes also seems cursed on the injury front. The basketball team of 1982-83 was a contender for the league title and was led by Guy Williams, who was 6'9" and could play all five positions on the floor. He was leading the Pac-10 in scoring and rebounding when he tore up his knee in a game at Eugene, never to play for WSU again. Pitcher/1B John Olerud had arguably the greatest single season in college baseball history in 1988, batting .464 as a hitter and going 15-0 as a pitcher. He then suffered a scary brain aneurysm in the offseason. He recovered, of course, and had a pretty successful major league career, but his Coug days were more or less over at the point.
I could go on and on, give one example after another. The members of the Zzu Crew have been putting up with this stuff for decades. But it’s not all bad, of course. Like I say, Pullman is a quirky sort of place, and everyone associated with the university makes it a point of not taking themselves that seriously. (The Far Side creator Gary Larson is a W.S.U. alum, after all.) There is good humour to be had, and no one stays too mad about defeat for all that long. And the school’s particular peculiar challenges make it a ripe place for innovators and unorthodox thinkers in the coaching ranks. Football’s spread offense, all the rage at every level of the game, has roots in the Palouse – long before it was trendy, W.S.U. coaches Dennis Erickson and then Mike Price had the field spread wide and the school’s long lineage of top calibre quarterbacks throwing the ball all over the place. On the hardwood, W.S.U. was a perfect place for Dick Bennett, whose teams played suffocating, claustrophobic defense like none other and gave the school instant credibility – teams would circle that game with the Cougars on the schedule and absolutely, positively dread it. You have to do things a little bit differently at W.S.U., take some risks and be creative. When it works out, the rewards – however fleeting – can be joyous. The huge numbers of W.S.U. alums assembling in the Bay Area for football games during the Golden Age (3 straight 10-win seasons from 2000-2002) made the games in Berkeley and Palo Alto seem like home games. And the 1998 Rose Bowl, which was W.S.U. first trip to Pasadena since 1931, was one of the most sought-after tickets in the game’s history, as something like 400,000 requests for W.S.U.’s allotment of 40,000 seats.
And I had vowed that if the Cougars ever made the Rose Bowl, I would fire up the BBQ. And so there I was on Jan. 1, 1998, grilling up a lobster and a couple of Porterhouses in -8° temperatures in western Colorado while watching the game through the screen door.
And it was a great game, of course, and one with a fitting end: W.S.U. losing. And not just any sort of loss, mind you, but a controversial loss – the Cougars hurrying to the line of scrimmage at the Michigan 25 yd-line, trailing 21-16 to the #1 ranked Wolverines; QB Ryan Leaf spiking the ball to stop the clock with :02 left …
Except the clock didn’t stop and ran to :00. Game over.
W.S.U. has been waiting to run that last play of the game for 15 years now.
“I got a commemorative Rose Bowl watch. It runs two seconds fast.”
– Mike Price
