Monday Goulash

Mmmmm, just like momma made!

Welcome back Coug fans! I take it you all enjoyed your little trip over the moon with the announcement of Mike Leach as the Cougs new coach. Hell, even the Cougar basketball team seemed re-invigorated by the news and put a hurtin’ on Eastern under their glorious new center-hung scoreboard at Beasley. It has been one of the craziest weeks ever in the history of Cougardom and there is almost too much to talk about in a single post, so I am just going to cram it all in to a mess I like to call… Monday Goulash.

Lets start off with the BCS. So who is looking forward to the big LSU Alabama re-match!!!! Anyone… anyone? Buhler? Well after about ¾ of the College Gameday broadcast dedicated to Nick Saban’s pathetic plea to fans that this game will be worth watching, I flipped over to CBS AND HE WAS DOING THE SAME THING ON THEIR SET! Alabama is so desperate to get people interested in their snooooooozefest re-match that they have cloned Nick Saban so he can be on every channel at once pimping this awful matchup. Once again I say just implement what I like to call the Longball Clause, that no team is eligible for the championship game unless they are their conference champion and VOILA, we would all get to see Okie State, LSU, just like the computers say we should. Or, ya know, lets quit screwing around and just have a playoff.

In other College Football news, we aren’t the only team that is bidding adieu to a member of the proverbial family this off season. I was surprised to see that Fresno State has fired Pat Hill. I mean if there was another Paterno-esque situation anywhere in the country it may have been Pat Hill in the Valley. Of course, I don’t follow Bulldog football too closely, but on further inspection it appears that the locals had just become disenchanted with the same results year after year without any trend back towards their glory years circa 2001. As much as I feel that Wullf had built us a bowl team for next year and perhaps the forseeable future, I do wonder if he would have been our Pat Hill. Would he have taken us to the brink of glory only to fall just short? Would he have continually done just well enough to not warm up his seat, but never quite get us to the next level? Price proved that we can win championships on the Palouse, but he certainly didn’t prove that just anybody can do it. While I think Wulff and his crew understood Price’s winning formula better than just about anybody, especially in recruiting, I am not certain that they had the chops to pull off some of the huge wins that put Price’s teams over the top eventually. That said, if they can look past 9-40 I think this would be a perfect job for CPW. He is from the area and he recruits that area extremely well. He may be mortally wounded by his 9-40 record at Wazzu when looking for head jobs, but if I was the next coach at Fresno State my first call would be to Paul Wulff as O-line Coach/Recruiting Coordinator.

How about Cougar basketball? Did you all know that the season is 8 games old already and our mighty Cougs are 4-4? After getting humiliated in the most sparsely attended pre-season tournament I have ever seen, the Cougs have bounced back with huge wins over Grambling State and Eastern. If you are wondering how the Grambling score got so lop-sided, well they didn’t bring their band. They also only suited up 7 players. Yeeesh. So it may not be quite enough to move us up Joe Lunardi’s list, but you gotta be excited to see Charlie Enquist score 20 points. Seriously, I just typed that and you just read it and nobodies pants are on fire. This was a nice surprise because we were without the services of DJ Shelton who has already fallen afoul of the team rules and was suspended. The suspension is “indefinite” and ongoing, so who the hell knows what it was but we’re talking about a kid who spent the last few years bouncing between programs like a super ball. Color me a bit skeptical that we’ll have Mr. Shelton on campus for the remainder of his eligibility. And speaking of skeptical… is there anyone left that would still rather have Reggie on our roster than Xavier Thames? Good grief, time to find that tree that point guards grow on. This season I think we all just need to assume the turtle position, take our licks, get this new recruiting class in, get Faisel Aden out and move on towards a brighter future.

Dan Wilson is a little too excited about the Mike Leach hire

And what about Cougar Football? Man oh man, I think we have run out of pirate analogies. Mike Leach is bringing his own version of whackadoodle to the Palouse and the ROTC guys are planning their switch from a pack howitzer to a Gatling gun to keep up with all the scoring. Bill Moos positioned himself to make a swift and explosive hire after dismissing Paul Wulff and left us in the unfamiliar position of being envied by UCLA and ASU fans. With Rich Rod at Arizona, Leach in Pullman and names like Larry Fedora and June Jones being bandied about, it appears there is a full on offensive arms race underway in the Pac-12 just in time to take advantage of our new TV deal and all the new exposure it will give us. Larry Scott has to be LOVING Bill Moos right now, eh? Over the next few weeks we will sort out our new staff and most importantly, our new defensive coordinator. While Leach didn’t exactly ignore the defensive side of the ball in Lubbock, he certainly didn’t obsess over it, but word is he has a new found interest in defense and he spent some time nurturing it with the Ryan family during his sabbatical from football. I think this will be a very interesting hire and with the extra half million dollars Moos has allocated for assistant sallaries, we probably wont go begging. As excited as I am to see our offense go bananas, I am just as excited for the next time I am in Martin Stadium rocking out a sincere shark attack. It’s been too long!

Enjoy your Monday Coug fans and hang in there, baseball season is just around the corner!