Washington State, abandoned but not forgotten, storms college football scene
Field-stormings vary.
Happen upon one at Auburn after Auburn beats Alabama, and the mass on the grass thickens so much that you might fret about some victim of delirium and other influences winding up lodged in those field-side hedges, re-watching the game on a phone on a loop, undiscovered until Monday morning when some hapless groundskeeper peers in.
In 2002 at Ohio State after a popular outcome against Michigan, the detritus raked into one end zone after a storming included a pair of jeans, hinting at the untold bravery of someone shedding them in the late-November air before heading home in, one hopes, boxers.
They had one at Colorado in the great Boulder on Saturday after Coach Deion Sanders et al. beat Nebraska, 36-14, to reach 2-0 as an attention-seizing vortex of the national college football season, and that storming might have seemed one of those gratuitous stormings given Nebraska’s moribund recent past. Forgive it. It sprang from years of the glumness of losing and indifference.
Stormings tend to fall in categories, even the manufactured ones, but …
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The one they held at dusk Saturday up on the Palouse in Pullman, Wash., forged its own category.
It’s not just a field-storming from the abandoned. It’s historic.
It’s the first field-storming from a fan base left behind by a lunatic national realignment of conferences so gutting that it leaves a venerable conference (the Pac-12) shorn to two programs, including that fan base (Washington State) whose nationally ranked victim Saturday (Wisconsin) belongs to one of the conferences (Big Ten) that snubbed it.
Yeah, it’s tangled.
“I think the coolest thing was,” fifth-year edge rusher Brennan Jackson told reporters in Pullman, “when the fans rushed the field, a bunch of them came up to me and they’re like, ‘Thank you for staying.’ Right? I think that just means the world because for us, like, we’re bred [Cougars], we want to be here, and that’s what we bleed, we bleed crimson and gray. So hearing that, it got me, like, a little teary-eyed because I’m like, ‘Guys, you don’t understand; thank you for giving us the opportunity for being here and wearing these colors and representing this university.’ ”
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Anyone else want to get teary right here?
To recap: In a sport governed by the whims and preferences and stultifying estimates of television networks, the Pac-12 had insufficient gigantic audiences for a variety of reasons, including that the American West is so gorgeous that people spend their Saturdays, say, hiking, rather than sedentarily gorging on beer and seven-bean dip. In the summer of 2022, Southern California and UCLA bolted for the Big Ten and its giant TV dollars, effective in 2024.
In the summer of 2023, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State left for the Big 12, effective 2024; Oregon and Washington left for the Big Ten, effective 2024; and the ACC scooped up Stanford and California at a yard sale, effective 2024. Twelve minus 10 made two: Oregon State and Washington State, left to lurch around forlornly seeking refuge somewhere among the tiers, wherever the market might deposit them.
Wouldn’t you know, Washington State’s home opener happened to bring in No. 19 Wisconsin, which Washington State defeated, 17-14, last year in the great Madison.
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Then, when the Cougars raged to a 24-6 lead and held on by 31-22 on Saturday behind quarterback Cam Ward, and the fans stormed out of the seats and down to the dance, video clips caught the public address system playing House of Pain’s eternal 1992 “Jump Around,” which happens to be the staple of Wisconsin as well as the best staple in all of college football.
That was some cold, cold DJing, right there.
Those who stormed the field emerged from an overflow crowd of 33,024, and that kind of number, lower than at other places, stands tall among the reasons a Washington State gets shunned in a country without a soul. The stormers couldn’t fill the field, making it more likely that everyone retains their pants.
They stormed well after the second quarter had brought a moment worthy of a museum of the era, a museum to which entry would cost a bloody fortune. The ESPN broadcast showed Pat Chun, the Washington State athletic director, on the sideline doing a TV interview using words redolent of the era. He had just gotten near the ending of the sentence, “We need clarity on these issues,” a pleading business sentence if ever there were one, when the game insisted on an interruption because Ron Stone Jr. had turned up in the backfield over Wisconsin quarterback Tanner Mordecai’s left shoulder and had separated Mordecai from the burden of the football. That ball had bounced nicely to Stone’s roomie and fellow edge rusher, Jackson, who had scored from two yards.
Jackson had not lumbered or rumbled, for there hadn’t been space. He sort of just teetered so beautifully into the end zone with a lineman draped on him and some crimson and some gray in his bloodstream. It epitomized the game’s charms.
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“We don’t really buy into the underdog mentality,” Stone told reporters. “We think we belong on the field with anyone else.”
“I think this is another defining moment in WSU history,” Jackson said. “For us, it’s showing it doesn’t matter what analysts say or what other people say about us. It’s like, when you come to Pullman, you have to play a complete game or else we’re going to beat you.”
“There’s a lot of things that I would really love to say,” said 40-year-old Cougars Coach Jake Dickert, who knows the pathways of the tiers as a former wide receiver at Wisconsin Stevens Point. “But at the end of the day, our team belongs at the highest level. Our program does. That’s in my heart. I believe that. I say that with a meaning.”
And as for those “analysts” to whom Jackson referred, the key ones would be TV market analysts — an emblem, if ever there was one, of a land striving to become dreary.
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The Cougars had themselves a night. They held Wisconsin to 90 rushing yards even if that factors in their three sacks, which statistically it should not. (It was 113 without and 4.3 per carry, with a long rush of 17.) They used the first home game of the nascent season to honor the late Mike Leach, who had brought eyeballs, fanfare and total yardage to Pullman across eight seasons (2012-19), concluding three years before his death in December while coaching Mississippi State. Cougars coaches wore shirts with pirate motifs reflecting Leach’s fascination with pirates.
Those were the days, but now Dickert called this moment a “crux point” and saw his team “carrying the flag for all the transition, and I get that, and this is a pivotal moment of where we want to go.”
With all that weight, it’s a wonder anyone could storm the field.
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