9/4 – @ Oklahoma State
9/11 – Montana State
9/18 – @ SMU
9/25 – Southern Cal
10/2 -@ UCLA
10/9 – Oregon
10/16 – Arizona
10/23 – @Stanford
10/30 – @ASU
11/6 – bye
11/13 – @ OSU
11/20 – California
11/27 – bye
12/4 – Washington
The good: Well, there’s five Pac-10 home games, as well as a couple of byes. And four of the first seven games are home games. Maybe the best chance at an early-season surprise is getting a team in Pullman that is still trying to get their act together early in the year, meanwhile the Cougs are still relatively healthy? MAYBE??? And of course, the 12/4 frozen Apple Cup, which should be entertaining. BUNDLE UP!
The bad: The byes are nice, but, they still have to play NINE weeks in a row before the first week of rest arrives. A bye in early October would have been nice. Who knows what the season will look like when they finally make it to the 11/6 bye week. And oh yeah, while four of those first seven games are home games, they are against USC, Oregon and Arizona, possibly three of the best teams in the Pac-10 in ’10! And the price of those early home games is a lot of road games late, with no home game between 10/16 to 11/20.
One question still unanswered is which game will be played in Seattle, if at all? Clearly the desire is there, per Howie Stalwick’s latest. What’s weird this year is that there is an option of playing either Montana State on 9/11, or Oregon on 10/9 at Qwest Field. Hmmm. Obviously the Oregon game would be the better draw, as one can pretty much bank on Oregon bringing 25,000 fans with them to Seattle in early October. Don’t let the ticket allotments fool you, Oregon fans will find a way to get into the building. It might not have much of a home-field advantage, at all (not that the game has been a smashing success in that department lately). Montana State might be the preferred opponent, simply for the fact that the odds of actually winning a game are pretty good, and after losing the last two years in Seattle, they definitely want to show well for the west side per the article:
However, Sterk said a Sept. 11 game works better for related events tied in with the Seattle game and makes it easier to avoid holding a key event in Pullman (like Dad’s Weekend) during the Nov. 20 game with California. That comes at the start of the Thanksgiving week break from classes at WSU.
“We’ve built a monster (the annual Qwest games), with 24 events around it,” Sterk said. “Those folks, their preference is Montana State.”
I get the idea of Montana State. Plus, there is a new issue the athletic department is likely dealing with in terms of Oregon and playing in Seattle. Remember, they have been asking people to put up large sums of money for luxury seating in Pullman in order to get Phase III up and running. But the idea of doing that, then turning around and moving a premier NW rival like Oregon to Seattle might make some of the higher-level donors angry that they are losing a game of that magnitude to Seattle. Just something to consider in the bigger picture, but the idea of moving a conference heavyweight to Seattle could be a much larger issue than we might think!
Finally, still no official news on the offensive line coach search. However, we did hear some rumblings that the picture is clarifying, and we might be close to the hiring. Hopefully we get the announcement sooner rather than later.
Enjoy your day, and GO COUGS!
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