WSU Flag Spotting, Apple Cup Edition

Good morning Cougs, happy Apple Cup day to you and yours.  As you can see, although you might have to squint a little bit from the picture, but Crimson & Whitey are front-and-center.  They made the trek to Gainesville for the ESPN Gameday extravaganza.  If you are scoring at home, that’s now 89 STRAIGHT, and counting!

If you saw the Bud Withers story from the Times this week, you got a really good story on the whole WSU flag experience.  It’s not an easy thing, and it’s a real tribute to Cougs everywhere who step up and make the effort, week after week after week.  I noticed that Andrew Penneck was interviewed for the Times story, and I thought that name sounded a little familiar.  Turns out I wrote about him for AOL Sports back in 2006, when the WSU flag was at Auburn and he made his then-8th appearance on the show. 

Note – if you follow the link, the formatting on the story is awful.  They made some changes at AOL since then, and part of it was to change fonts and spacing and all that.  Just be warned it’s not easy on the eyes…..anyway, as usual a huge thanks to the flag-wavers, even in the face of losing 20+ games over the last two years.  And thanks to Will and Stephanie Walker for the screen capture.  We salute you!

That’s really it for this AM.  There are lots of links and such, but you know where to find them. 

All I have to add is this – there’s a LOT of overconfidence that’s oozing from Huskyville right now.  Some of the stuff I heard this week, the way they are talking?  You’d think Jake Locker would be flying to New York tomorrow to accept the his third straight Heisman, and meanwhile the team was just about ready to clinch their 102nd consecutive Pac-10 title after they hang 70+ on the “Portland State of the Pac-10” today….instead of a 3-win team that hasn’t won since October 10th….

But whatever.  That’s how we like it, isn’t it?  We’ve been the favorite this decade, several times in fact, and more times than not, it didn’t exactly work out. 

2001:  WSU favored by roughly 7 points, yet lost the game 26-14.
2002:  WSU favored by 8, UW wins on the backwards pass call 29-26.

2003:  WSU favored by 7, UW wins a sloppy one with a ton of WSU turnovers (6) and a crazy catch and subsequent INT return for TD to seal it, 27-19. 
2006:  WSU favored by 8, UW wins on a blocked punt for TD and near-kickoff return for TD, 35-32. 

Meanwhile, the underdog thing has worked out recently for our Cougs. 

2007:  WSU was a 6-point underdog, yet won the game 42-35 on Brink’s 399-yard, 5-TD day.  Maybe the greatest Alex Brink performance of all-time, and one of the greatest WSU QB performances in the history of the Apple Cup.

And of course, 2008:  WSU was a 7.5-8 pt underdog, yet got it done, 19-16.

So we’re clearly back in the familiar underdog seat, and with that, I HOPE UW is cocky and overlooking this game, thinking they can just coast through it as if it’s some sort of glorified practice.  Because we can say whatever we want about Paul Wulff, or the stagnant performances we’ve seen this year, the injuries, youth, etc.  But don’t we know that he will have them ready to go??  We saw it last year, even with a team some might say is worse than this year’s version in terms of the sheer insanity of the blowout losses, yet they STILL figured out a way to win by playing hard and never quitting. 

So, it may not be pretty, and the mistakes will still be made that come with youth and inexperience, but there is little doubt from where I sit that they will be ready to play football at 3:30. 

ENJOY THE DAY, the final game tonight, and as always…GO COUGS!