Students vote YES

Nice! Last count was Yes – 3,937 (59%), No – 2,753 (41%).

Now phases I and II will begin in earnest as soon as the 06 AC is in the books, ready to go for the opening of 2007. Restrooms, concessions, east end zone entrance as shown above, new scoreboard for phase I. Phase II will take care of the north side, including concessions and restrooms. Hopefully some momentum will be generated now that we’ll actually be able to see, touch and feel the changes by 2007, and phase III can in fact happen (phase III will include additional seats, premium seats, etc).

In other news, the Dick Bennett era is over. I’m very interested in what young Tony is going to bring to the program. While they took major strides under Dick and put in a system that is a headache, Tony has made some comments of late that they are going to look to change things up a bit, especially on offense, and that could help recruiting. But he’s also said, many times, “We can’t go out and run with Washington, Arizona and UCLA. They’ll run us off the floor if we tried that.” A lot of that is talent, clearly, but it would be nice to see a little more of an open offense!

In some perspective, Dick did a hell of a job. We actually won AT ARIZONA last year, are you kidding me? They also beat the Pauley Pavilion hex, and swept UW this year. While they never took the next step and made a postseason tourney of any kind, and there were nights that they were downright dreadful, Dick did what he set out to do, and that is to build a program!

On Tony – I’m excited for him, but I’m also a little nervous. It makes you wonder, as I heard a guy on ESPN radio saying that it’s a bad hire for WSU. I’m thinking “huh?” He goes on to say that a lot of times, these great, successful men pave their own way, and yet their sons just aren’t their fathers. A lot of times, sons of crazy successful men grow up “soft”. I know that’s a big generalization, and I think very highly of Tony from what I’ve read and heard and I think he’s a nice, fresh face that has great college and NBA playing experience and will bring some dynamics to the job that we are pretty fortunate to have at WSU, but he is 0-0 as a head coach. We’ll see how the transition goes, but I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to the hoops program from here on out!

Nice to see the NFL get their act together. The best part is the Hawks now have about $20 million in cap room! Can you believe that? Their core is intact, and they have room to spare under the cap. Tremendous. They’ll keep Hutch, no matter what, but they’ll still have plenty of room to spare to try and keep some key parts, as well as flirt with some other free agents out there. Going to be a pretty wild free agent season!