Unless you’ve been living in a subterranean cave, or have been in a coma for the last three years, you know that this is a great time for football in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon appeared in the first-ever College Football Playoff National Championship Game Presented by Too Many Money Grubbing Corporations. The Seattle Seahawks are back in the Super Bowl. Even the have-nots have hope for the future; although Oregon State and both Washington schools are currently down, there’s reason to pay attention to all those programs.
Washington has the former Boise State head coach, Chris Peterson, at the helm. The first year didn’t go too well for the Huskies, but it usually takes three years, at least, to properly judge a college football coach. Let’s see how Peterson does when he’s got his own recruits in there. If he can have BCS-level success at mid-major Boise State, odds are he’ll have Washington on a winning track.
Washington State (I call them Wazzu; they should always bear the moniker Wazzu. Let’s make this happen Internet!) is fun to watch, the Air Raid offense perfected by coach Mike Leach at Texas Tech hanging its usual ridiculous amounts of points of stats and points.
Defense has never been a priority for Leach, but in the Pac-12 (and most levels of football, honestly) offense is king. It’s as hard to win at Pullman as it is in Corvallis, but I’d take what Leach has got up there instead of the embarrassing displays the Cougars have been putting on before his arrival.
Oregon State saw its longtime coach, Mike Riley, jump to Nebraska. My editor and I exchanged thoughts when this happened. We both wish Mike very well, but we both think it’ll end poorly. Gary Andersen coming over from Wisconsin, a highly successful Big Ten program, was almost as big a shock as Riley leaving to take over a Big Ten program.
Andersen’s move after just two years–two very successful years, to be clear–suggests that he could have clashed with athletic director Barry Alvarez, who coached the Badgers for eons before moving upstairs. While Andersen wasn’t the first coach to get annoyed with Alvarez, his relationship with OSU athletic director Bob De Carolis is worth paying attention to.
As for the wildly successful Oregon Ducks, while the wins on the field are the product of hard work by the players and coaches, that work and those players are only parts of the equation.
I have a phrase for children of people that had incredible success in life. You know, those folks who’ve had the silver spoons in their mouths, who won’t ever have to lift a finger because Mommy or Daddy did all the heavy lifting. I call them members of the “Lucky Sperm Club.”
The basic fact is that Oregon wouldn’t be nearly as successful if Phil Knight, who founded the athletic apparel giant Nike, weren’t pouring money into every aspect of their football operations. Whether it’s funding shiny new football facilities to impress the simple minds of 18-year-old jocks or providing new uniform combinations EVERY GAME, Knight’s fingerprints are all over the Oregon football program. It’s an advantage that can’t be matched or countered in the Pac-12, except perhaps by USC, the program Oregon displaced as the king of the West.
Let me say that I have no problems with the intentions of Knight; his contributions to the school he went to are truly generous, and come from a desire to positively impact the university. He paid for the Ducks’ new basketball arena, was instrumental in the reestablishment of the baseball program (which itself has done excellently, by the way), and in general is a huge supporter of amateur sports…even if the term “amateur” in football and basketball is swiftly going extinct.
I have a problem with the university taking Knight’s money, however. The business of major college football and basketball is a corrupt one; asking these young men to take the risk of playing football while everybody from their coaches, to the schools they play for, to the conferences overseeing their programs, to the NCAA itself is raking in billions of dollars from the football bowls and the men’s basketball tournament. The Playoff was the most watched event in cable TV history. In CABLE TV HISTORY.
The guys we watch play on the field or on the court don’t see a damned dime of those billions. Better folks than I have written about the injustice of this system, and I won’t harp on about it further. I’ve mostly stopped writing about college sports years ago because of my disgust for covering them, but when the players at Oregon have huge success, I’d do them a disservice by totally ignoring the hard work they’ve done to get to where they are.
My father and brother are bigger football guys than I am; my brother is a Seahawks fan (imagine the tension of a San Francisco 49ers fan and a Seachicken fan owning the same house together. The last NFL season sucked), while my father, who hails from central Illinois, grew up a Chicago Bears fan. Dad’s favorite memories are going to the old Soldier Field with his dad.
If the Niners aren’t doing well, I usually give passing attention to the NFL, but my father, living with my brother and I after my parents split up, insists on putting whatever football game is shown on CBS or FOX on the TV. The man’s religion should be Football Orthodox.
The success of the local teams distracts Dad from the implosion of his beloved Bears; a Sunday hasn’t gone by this year when he hasn’t lamented the craptastic defense Chicago’s played under former coach Marc Trestman. I’m aiming to make a living writing about basketball, so living in a football-dominated house is slightly troubling, but given the success of the teams in this corner of the world, I don’t blame them one bit for being football fans.
The sport of football itself is undergoing scrutiny for the unsafe practices that were just recently weeded out. Ever-improving equipment and the Heads Up tackling drills being taught to today’s children will hopefully result in a safer sport when those kids become tomorrow’s football stars.
The NFL is led by incompetents and liars, but some of the individual teams (like the four featured in last Sunday’s championship games) are run by highly intelligent football people. As the young, hungry front office executives in certain organizations move on to General Manager jobs, you’ll see the quality of front-office leadership rise. Washing off the moral stains of the past year’s events off the field will take years; for some people, those stains will never come off.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the land of beer, coffee, great hiking, common sense, and rain, is where home will always be for me. My family has a nomadic history, but Oregon’s the kind of place where transplants tend to put down roots. This place is a great fit for me, and if the sports were terrible here, I’d still have a great time.
The great sports teams are a bonus, but a very welcome one.
(For those of you who ask, “What, no ode to the Seahawks?” I refuse to carry the water on that one. There are plenty of great Seahawk writers on this site. As for me, I got two letters for the Seahawks and their back-to-back Super Bowl runs: F and U. I got two fingers too.)
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