Great Expectations

Happy Saturday, Cougs! Don’t let the picture fool you. This will not be a literary discussion. I’ve never read the book, but for various reasons I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about expectations. As a sports fan, having high expectations of a team or player is what makes the run-up to every season a lot of fun (or potentially miserable if you know in your heart of hearts your team just won’t have it that year). A quick look around my personal sporting landscape over the course of the last year shows several examples of how high expectations can toy with emotions and allow you to believe things are turning out much worse than they really are. My favorite NFL team is the Cincinnati Bengals. Surely not many among you read the name of that franchise and associate it with any expectation other than abject failure, but last season coming off a division title hopes were high. The epic disaster that ensued was bitterly disappointing on a much grander scale because it differed so vastly from what I thought was going to happen. Had someone told me in advance that the 2010 season would be a wasteland, it would have been more tolerable to watch as it circled the drain. I’ve learned now to assume that every Bengals season is going to go badly and hope to be pleasantly surprised. This was a recurring theme for me among all my favorites recently. My President’s Trophy winning Washington Capitals flamed out in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and have toyed with my hopes throughout this season. While John Wall has shown flashes of brilliance for my non-so-mighty Washington Wizards, the team on the whole is brutal, which once again stung even more since I thought they could at least advance to mediocre.

At this point you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about a bunch of other random teams on the WSU Football Blog. Well, readers, it’s become clear that Washington State is not immune to the expectation-turned-disappointment problem. I’ve come to realize that we may be looking at the 2010-11 basketball season in entirely the wrong way. Let me explain…

In the preseason, our Cougs were picked to finish fifth in the Pac 10 conference. It was largely accepted among Cougar Nation that the projection was a touch low. That belief was further aided by the fact that virtually everyone expected the Pac 10 to be somewhere between bad and quite bad. To further complicate matters, the Cougs came charging out of the gate in non-conference play, even notching some big wins against Gonzaga and Baylor. Everything was clicking. One of the biggest holes from last season – a secondary scorer to lift the burden off of Klay Thompson – had apparently been filled by Faisal Aden. In national publications doing their conference previews, Washington State was universally accepted as a contender for the Pac 10 championship. As has been well documented, especially lately, the season has gone off the rails since then. 

Let’s take a closer look at how the season played out. I’m now of the belief that we all got a little carried away with our expectations. Taking a more pragmatic approach, there was little or no reason to believe the team would make THE LEAP from last place in the Pac 10 in 2009-10 to title contender in 2010-11. There was even some retroactive expectation manipulation at play here. We all expected last year’s team to be much better too. It was accepted that a last place finish was a result far below what the team actually deserved. The fact of the matter is that the team did in fact finish in last place. It just didn’t feel that way. Being a sports fan is an emotional activity and our emotions allowed us to feel that the Cougs were a better team last year than perhaps they ever were. As “last season” turned into “next season”, there were very few, if any Cougar fans who were looking at the season under normal circumstances of trying to climb out of the conference cellar.

The two big wins I mentioned that were the primary cause for much of the optimism, Baylor and Gonzaga, have been discredited as their respective seasons have progressed. We even allowed the expectations of other programs to cloud the judgment of our own. We were all able to conveniently forget an ugly overtime struggle against Santa Clara and a second-half meltdown against Butler. With the advantage of hindsight, those games look far more like warning signs than bumps in the road. 

Faisal Aden’s excellent play to start the season led us to believe that we could expect that of him for 30+ games, a concept that viewed more rationally is pretty unrealistic for a player in his first season of major college basketball. We could extend this same thought to basically Klay Thompson’s entire career, from his commitment until now. If you look strictly at his body of work, his performance is outstanding and in line with exactly what we should expect from him. Unfortunately, we fans are a greedy sort and expect a great deal more so when Klay doesn’t go off for 28 points every single night, it feels disappointing.

For something to be thought of as successful, it usually means that results met or exceeded expectations. Unfortunately, when it comes to sports, our expectations are almost always misplaced to a certain degree. I’m not saying fans are to blame for this. After all, who wants to go into a season believing that your team is destined for sixth place? This basketball season has not produced results that are consistent with what we thought would happen and has therefore been extremely disappointing. The question we have to ask is whether or not what we thought would happen was reasonable in the first place. Since the loss to Arizona State, I’ve been able to re-evaluate things a little bit and think that relatively speaking, this year hasn’t been the disaster I had previously thought. Perhaps the “underachiever” label that has been slapped on this team is an unfair one since we’re the ones who decided what they could achieve in the first place.  With all of that in mind, I’m going to leave you with a couple of predictions: 

The Cougs will walk into Bank of America Alaskan Airlines Starbucks Court at Hec-Ed tomorrow night and beat the ever-loving crap out of those insufferable Dogs.

The 2011 football team WILL go to a bowl game. 

These are my expectations. I just can’t help myself.