One of the distinct pleasures around releasing a book is all the people you meet and all the paths they’ve taken to have an interest in your book.

The point was driven home recently in a signing staged by the good folks at Washington State University’s Lewis Alumni Centre, where, shortly into the event, in walked a tall guy whom I hadn’t seen in perhaps 50 years.

Though time has a way of chiseling away at our features over half a century, for some reason I managed to riffle through the mental Rolodex and immediately splash forth a name: Rick Simon.

He and I came upon each other via quirky circumstances way back in 1970. I was a senior at WSU, doing part-time grunt work at the school’s news bureau, making $1.40 an hour. They’d give me a stack of press releases on students who had received scholarships from various companies, and I’d bat out a two-paragraph story to be sent (sent, literally) to the student’s hometown newspaper: “Joanie Jones of Federal Way, a junior at Washington State University, has been awarded a $500 Weyerhaeuser scholarship . . . ”

That was my 10-hour-a-week existence at the news bureau. But one day, my boss assigned me a juicy story way out of my work-a-day routine.

Two WSU undergrads had just gotten the rights to the school’s football and basketball radio broadcasts. And they were going to be the on-air talent.

Everybody associates WSU radio broadcasts with the legendary Bob Robertson, who died in 2020 at the age of 91. But everybody forgets – or more likely, is too young to know – that for three years, 1969-71, Robertson interrupted his WSU broadcasting career to work for the rival Washington Huskies.

His two replacements, for two seasons of WSU sports, were Rick Simon and Mark Kaufman, broadcast majors at the school.

So now, 55 years after the fact, Rick Simon is standing there at a signing table, explaining how it all came about. The rights had gone for $2,000 annually, he says, and were owned by KGA radio in Spokane. When the bidding came open, he and Kaufman went large, coming up with $4,100. KGA stayed at $2,000. Lo and behold, they had the rights, at an age when they could scarcely buy a drink legally in Pullman.

They might have wondered what they got themselves into. WSU’s 1970 season was one of the very worst in school history; in a four-game stretch, the Cougars allowed 232 points to the California schools. And in a 63-16 loss to Jim Plunkett’s Stanford, a WSU student from Richland named Terry Smith came out of the stands and tackled a Stanford ball-carrier.

In basketball, meanwhile, beloved Marv Harshman left his job after 13 seasons – for the dreaded, despised Huskies across the state.

Simon worked in the horse-racing industry for a time and in public relations. Kaufman’s working life was in the horse industry; he was PR director at Longacres Racetrack in Seattle from 1977-1990. He died at 47 in Louisville in 1995 while helping plan media services for the Kentucky Derby.

Oh, and a post-script. The boss I mentioned earlier? That was Dick Fry, who had moved into the job as director of the news bureau after holding the title of WSU sports-information director since 1952. He became a walking encyclopedia on WSU athletics, published a colorful history of the school’s sports with the “Crimson and the Gray” in 1989, and today, is 102 years old. His book – and he – were valuable resources when I went to research for “Too Good to Be Through.”

Excuse us; we Mariner fans out here are sort of baseball hayseeds. The club has been to the playoffs six times in 49 seasons, and never to the World Series, so we’re a little new to all this October frenzy.

We thought getting to the playoffs was like, you know, more of a linear experience. As in, when you’re good enough to get there, you don’t have these hysterical mood swings. But one day, the Mariners are the ’61 Yankees, the next they’re the ’24 White Sox. You’d think, given the 162 games and all, it’d be a steady ride devoid of bottomless potholes and heroin highs.

It’s been anything but. Grab a seat on this runaway roller coaster and relive the dizzying yin and yang of the 2025 Mariner season:

April

In the third series of 2025, they get swept by the Giants and Victor Robles tears up his shoulder running into a net in rightfield. A net in rightfield? What’s up with that? They’re 3-7 after a winter of inactivity. The fan base wants to fire Dan Wilson, Jerry Dipoto and John Stanton. It’ll be hard to fire Stanton, since he’s the owner.

A week later, they sweep the Rangers in three games at home – or what they pretty much always do to the Rangers in Seattle.

May

The Mariners get swept over three games at home against the Blue Jays. They’re awful. They can’t pitch or hit.

The next weekend, they go on the road and sweep the Padres, allowing one run per game. This team can both pitch and hit.

On the 29th and 30th, they have the most Mariner two-game stretch imaginable, and at home, yet. First, they go to extra innings against the Nationals, who score a franchise-extra inning record seven runs in the 10th and win, 9-3. Against the Twins the next night, Seattle takes a 6-3 lead into the ninth, Andres Munoz melts down and it goes extras again, and Minnesota scores six in the 10th to win, 12-6. The Nats and Twins would combine to finish 52 games under .500.

June

In their first full series of the month, the M’s get swept in Seattle by the Orioles. The Orioles. There’s a school of thought that the Mariners are actually better on the road.

The week after, in Phoenix, they get swept by the Diamondbacks. Now there’s a school of thought that they’re not good on the road, either.

But in that series opener, two names emerge: Dom Canzone, called up that day, murders a two-run, 450-foot homer to send the game to extra innings. He would hit .300 the rest of the way and shed a label as a Four-A player. And Josh Naylor won the game for the D-Backs with a grand slam. You’ve probably heard of him.

Later that week, they come home and sweep the Guardians.

A week later, here they are in a windblown, Wiffleball series at Wrigley Field, taking two of three against the capable Cubs, mostly because twice, they get two-homer, five-RBI games from Mitch Garver and Donovan Solano, which is a little like winning a football parlay with the Giants, Jets and Panthers. Those two homers would account for two-thirds of Solano’s eventual season home run total.

July

Early in the month, they sweep three against the Pirates at home, not allowing a run. The Mariners rock.

They immediately go on the road and get swept by the Yankees, in signature Mariner fashion, allowing 25 runs and losing the finale despite Bryan Woo carrying a no-hitter into the eighth with a 5-0 lead. No team in baseball has nursed such a late no-hitter with that lead, and lost, in 48 years. This team is finished.

They go into Detroit, the team with the best record in baseball, score 35 runs and sweep the Tigers. This team clearly has what it takes.

August

They’re off on a seven-game win streak against the Rangers, White Sox and Rays at home. They’ve finally got this thing figured out.

On the road again, the Mariners lose two of three to the bedraggled Orioles, two of three to the Mets, and they surrender 29 runs in getting drubbed over three games by the Phillies. They’re cooked.

They rebound to win series at home against the A’s and Padres. They’re headed back out on the road again, and surely, chastened by the awful 2-7 trip earlier in the month, they’ll blitz this one.

They lose two of three to the Guardians, three straight to the Rays in which they allow 25 runs, and drop the opener to Atlanta. Now they’re 73-68, just a pedestrian baseball team staggering to the inevitable finish. Put a fork in ‘em.

September

On a Saturday night marking three weeks until the season’s last weekend, Julio Rodriguez hits a tiebreaking two-run homer, his second of the game, and the Mariners beat Atlanta, 10-2. The next day, they really beat Atlanta, 18-2.

They come home and win three edgy games against the Cardinals, 4-2, 5-3, 4-2. The last of those is in 13 innings, courtesy of a two-run walkoff homer by Leo Rivas. Leo Rivas?

Suddenly, they can’t lose. They win 10 in a row, lose one and win seven in a row, including three against the despicable Astros.

They’re the AL West champions. Naturally, in the final series, they get swept by the Dodgers, the eighth time somebody swept them over three games.

Bring on the post-season. We think.

PULLMAN, Wash. -- “Can you give me the eggbeater?” Debbie Hughes called down to nobody in particular from the steps of a trailer.

An eggbeater? What’s an eggbeater doing at a college-football tailgate?

Well, it was part of the ensemble last Saturday in an RV lot hard by Stadium Way in Pullman, before Washington met Washington State in an Apple Cup now positioned among the early games of September.

I’d ventured by a tailgate to check in on the temperature of some staunch WSU fans I’d met in 2021 in the process of hatching “Too Good to Be Through.” They’re died-in-the-wool crimson, as loyal to WSU as they are to each other, mostly retired farmers but also an ex-dentist and here or there, a businessman in Pullman.

Setting out for dinner along Stadium Way Thursday night, almost 48 hours before the game, we chanced to see a blue Winnebago in the choice RV lot -- the early arrivals for the big weekend against the Huskies.

“I’ll bet that’s them,” I said.

We hung an unscheduled left, and sure enough, it was them – Mike Sodorff, a fourth-generation farmer south of town on the road to Lewiston; Girard Clark, whose farm is up the road toward Albion off the road toward Colfax, and whose granddad played for the Cougars in the 1916 Rose Bowl; Bob Ransom, a potato farmer from Pasco; and Doug Hughes, another Pasco resident, a retired shop teacher and husband of the lady looking for the eggbeater.

We accepted gin and tonics and they told me a tale reflecting the shared fellowship and camaraderie and relationships around a football weekend here.

Years ago of a Friday night, the WSU band would make its way down the side street by that RV lot, and would stop and belt out the Cougar fight song for the benefit of those donors like Sodorff and his friends.

One night, they passed the hat for the band and told the band leader, “This’ll be a little drinking money for you guys.”

“Not for drinking,” they were told. “We need it for food.”

Thus was born a tradition. That pocket of RV owners would spring for, and prepare, a meal for the band. Saturday morning, that included pancakes (thus the eggbeater), Bob Ransom’s specialty of baked apples, and, courtesy of the local Marriott’s largesse, hash browns with onions smothered in melted Cougar Gold cheese.

Sodorff estimated his group has been cooking for the band maybe 15 years. It’s a cool tradition wrapped around Pac-12 football weekends, but now, only one of those two customs endures.

Cougar football is in sort of a holding pattern this year – the next home game is against Toledo, of all teams – as it transitions to a reimagined Pac-12.

The nostalgic among us can’t help but call up some of the neon moments at Martin Stadium from the genuine Pac-12 era, things that occurred just a couple of hundred yards from the Winnebago: The 17-point-underdog Cougars waylaying an otherwise-Pasadena-bound UW team in 1982; a 32-31 screamer in the 1988 Apple Cup, the Cougars winning; USC, with Junior Seau and Todd Marinovich, breaking WSU’s heart in Mike Price’s maiden year of 1989 with a field-length drive and two-point conversion to thwart the unbeaten Cougars, 18-17; Drew Bledsoe, flinging darts in the sideways snow to beat Washington, 42-23, in ‘92; the unforgettable 2002 triple-overtime howler, when the Huskies took down a No. 3-ranked WSU team, 29-26.

I asked Sodorff what will be lost with the departure of the Pac-12. All that history, he conceded. And the brilliance on the field. But the tailgating will go on, the Winnebago – shared by Sodorff, Clark and the dentist, Ken Gibson – will still be part of the landscape. The friendships aren’t diminished by the insanity of conference realignment.

He put it simply: “We’re Cougs.”

A couple of days later, Washington finished strong and won, 59-24, and it had an ominous feel to it, as if these times against the Huskies might shortly be a thing of the past.

The prevailing model among the Power Four football schools now appears to be nine-game league schedules and a non-league 10th game against a like adversary. Indeed, Washington has set up a home-and-home against Tennessee in 2029-30. Factor in the Huskies’ stated desire to play at least seven home games, and it’s impossible to accommodate WSU in a home-and-home every year.

The pact between the UW and WSU runs through 2028, but there’s chilling talk of the Huskies buying out the Cougars before it’s over. It’s not as though Washington is financially flush, but the Cougars are desperately cash-poor.

Wednesday in Seattle, Washington athletic director Pat Chun was on KJR-FM and was asked about the future of the Apple Cup beyond 2028. Not very convincingly, he said it was important to the state, and he said Washington would have to wait to see what sort of “mandate” the Big Ten wants in its members’ scheduling. His was hardly an impassioned plea to continue.

Tuesday, meanwhile, I checked in with Sodorff, and for a minute, we talked about something that often occupies farmers – the weather. Seems that the recent 80-degree-plus days gave way unexpectedly to an overnight freeze early in the week, putting a crimp in the pumpkin crop in his side lot.

Over here, the weather wins. The farmers adjust. It’s a good recipe for the Cougars.

In a football season that’s so far been all over the place, Washington State set off alarm bells last week with a 59-10 defeat to North Texas, which has to rank among the Cougars’ most stark defeats in history.

Which naturally leads WSU fans to wonder whether something similar might be ahead Saturday when they host a better team in Washington.

That prospect stirs another question in the minds of Cougars who might already be prone to attaching dark motives to anything purple and gold:

Would the Huskies, given the chance, run it up on Washington State?

Of course they would, say the skeptics. Why wouldn’t they, when, as former placekicker Chuck Nelson described to me in “Too Good to Be Through,” Washington fans put WSU in the category of an “irritant”?

This is a nuanced issue.

A year ago, WSU came into Lumen Field in Seattle and took down the Huskies, 24-19. The most memorable play was Washington’s fourth-and-one, goal-line brain cramp, when the Huskies opted to run speed option to the short side of the field, with Will Rogers ultimately pitching the ball to Jonah Coleman, who was bullied out of bounds at the WSU 3.

Ball game.

Washington’s first-year coach, Jedd Fisch, was pilloried for the play call on sports-talk radio, and indeed, it was the most condemned thing he did all season.

Hugh Millen, the ex-UW quarterback-turned-radio-analyst, sized it up like this: “It’s just a really bad play. The odds you’re going to get that play blocked against that front – it’d be like drawing to an inside flush. Everything is going to have to line up.

“I’m not trying to impugn Jedd Fisch as a coach. I’m impugning his entire thought process with that play. That play was the Washington Huskies getting their ass handed to us from a coaching standpoint.”

So there’s reason that Fisch might be chafing to make amends with the Cougars. Still, it was nothing they did other than play defense, and even as their fans and players celebrated with a massive mosh pit on the field, it didn’t seem as though there were actions or words that would invite retaliation. (That might not be the case if we’re talking about Jayden DeLaura planting the WSU flag at Husky Stadium after a 40-13 win in 2021.)

Of course, revenge for the loss would be a natural inclination among remaining UW players, even as most of the Cougars on that roster have departed, leaving 70-some new players on the manifest at WSU.

But there are two other factors that add spice to the question. First, Pat Chun is UW athletic director, having left the same job at WSU in 2024. Does his presence tilt the Huskies toward compassion, or nuclear proliferation?

Then there’s the matter of how we got here. The Huskies are in the Big Ten now, having left with Oregon two years ago, and while the move was certainly defensible, it proved to be a killer for the Cougars, who with Oregon State, were eventually left to their own devices in a decimated Pac-12.

Does that enter in? Would it be a bad – and surely lasting – blow to détente between the programs if quarterback Demond Williams was throwing deep balls in the fourth quarter with the Huskies up by five touchdowns?

If the contingency of a Washington blowout becomes reality, the Huskies might not be inclined to pour it on with their starters. They host Ohio State next week.

Tuesday, as the “Husky Honks” were discussing the Apple Cup matchup with WSU on KJR-FM, the former UW All-American running back, Greg Lewis, dismissed the Cougars as “trash,” referring to the quality of the team. When that raised eyebrows among his co-hosts, Lewis amended the description – I guess -- to “garbage.”

Whether the Cougars are capable of a response is the question.

It wasn’t really so long ago, was it, that Washington State fired football coach Paul Wulff, causing him to respond bitterly, “I believe the innocence of Washington State has been lost today. We don’t eat our own.”

Quaint, huh?

Wulff said this at season’s end in 2011. He had just gone 9-40 over four years.

Four years? By today’s standards of cashiering failed football coaches, four years seems more like four decades.

Sunday, UCLA whacked Deshaun Foster, who could tell Wulff, a former WSU center, a somber tale about being an alum cast to the trash heap. Foster got all of 15 games to prove his chops.

The same day, Virginia Tech rid itself of fourth-year coach Brent Pry.

Folks, the calendar hadn’t even hit mid-September yet.

It wasn’t so long ago, 20 years or so back, that it was unusual to see a college coach jettisoned before a season ended. Then the grim reaper began his work earlier, nudging into early November in some cases. Three years ago, Paul Chryst got fired at Wisconsin on October 2, the Badgers deciding that his 67-26 record there just wasn’t cutting it.

We live in impatient – some would say irrational – times.

Monday, Oregonian columnist Bill Oram called for the firing of second-year coach Trent Bray, which is a pretty startling commentary on where we are in 2025. Bray went 5-7 last year and is 0-3 this season, which makes him 5-10 at a school that from 1975 to 1992, won no more than two games 13 times. Oram detailed some of the Beavers’ fundamental failings in ’25, cited Bray’s seeming lack of presidential bearing and the F-bomb he dropped in a halftime interview and concluded OSU needs to stop the bleeding.

“The days of patiently building programs over years are over,” Oram wrote. “With rosters turning over every single year, it is a win-now business.”

Oram has watched the Beavers far more than I, and it’s quite possible OSU football is at an inevitable dead end with Bray as head coach. Where I would take issue with his premise about patience is that Oregon State, along with Washington State, has just been through a brutal, unthinkable couple of years, orphaned by the other 10 members of the Pac-12 and left to figure it out.

A year ago, Jake Dickert, then the WSU football coach, told me the Cougars were down seven positions in football support staff. The athletic budget, hardly one of college football’s most wasteful, had to be trimmed from $87 million to $74 million.

So Dickert left for Wake Forest and the Cougars replaced him with Jimmy Rogers of South Dakota State. In ’25, the Cougars have been unsteady, winning uneasily against Idaho, throttling San Diego State, and somehow getting obliterated 59-10 at North Texas.

Since Saturday the message boards have been unyielding. The Cougars were badly coached. They had too many FCS transfers who couldn’t play. The play-calling was terrible. Rogers is in over his head.

People have harked back to the Wulff regime, to which I would say, wait a minute. However they got there, the 2025 Cougars are 2-1, and I watched a 2009 Wulff team go an entire season never leading a game in regulation time.

Bigger picture, you get the sense that some fans just assume you’re supposed to be decent, and to hell with the extraneous details. To those folks, I would remind them that Rogers is working with 70-odd new faces this season – probably a little less reloading than they’re doing at, say, Georgia or LSU.

It’s distinctly possible that, two years after Oregon and Washington made that seminal pivot to the Big Ten, the full forces of the circumstances have come crashing down on OSU and WSU. The transfer portal has beckoned, and players are going where the money is.

Think about what’s changed in the Apple Cup dynamic. A year after the Cougars denied Washington at the goal-line to win the 2024 game, they lost a head coach, a quarterback in John Mateer who’s now front-and-center in the Heisman reckoning at Oklahoma, and assorted other talent. Washington has kept its key players and solidified where it was lacking. The Huskies are a three-touchdown favorite in the Apple Cup Saturday, and for WSU, it’s not likely to be pretty.

Meanwhile, OSU was able to pay for quarterback Maalik Murphy, and you can say that no matter the hardships, Bray can’t be excused if the Beavers aren’t fundamentally sound.

I don’t know if Bray can coach, and I don’t know if Jimmy Rogers is in over his head. What I do know is that as chaotic a time as this is in college football, it’s doubly dizzying for the indigents in the food chain. If ever there were a time for a little forbearance, this might be it.

Here’s an LA Times lede, from March 7, 2024, the writer probably would like to rephrase:

“UCLA’s new football coach came at a steep discount.”

Well, to stretch a point, I suppose you could argue Deshaun Foster once was a bargain for UCLA. As the writer noted, Foster’s $3-million contract to coach the Bruins was about half the value of predecessor Chip Kelly’s deal.

Today, you’d have a hard time convincing any UCLA loyalist – never mind the relative market dynamics – that Foster is any kind of a steal. The Bruins have flopped miserably in their first two games against Utah and UNLV, which means the next two against New Mexico and Northwestern, which ought to be gimmes, probably will be a death knell for Foster’s 14-game tenure if they aren’t.

Foster might have come at a discount 18 months ago, but the more pertinent discussion about him today is how much it might take to buy him out. If the Bruins decided to cashier him after this season, they’d owe him in the neighborhood of $5 million.

Around UCLA’s campus, and among its scattered influential boosters around LA, people must be looking at the world of college athletics turned upside down and asking this question: “What the hell are we doing here?”

It’s not merely a Deshaun Foster question. There have to be some misgivings about the Bruins having fallen in with their crosstown rival, USC, in joining the Big Ten Conference.

So many questions: Was there strong institutional support for joining USC in its defection to the Big Ten three years ago? What would have happened if the Bruins had stood firm and said no? Would it have been viable for the Big Ten to welcome the Trojans in, solo?

And ultimately: Might UCLA, in the next wave of TV negotiations (and thus, realignment), do as one message-board poster implored with three words a few months ago?: “Baby come back.”

The growing concern over Foster and the question of UCLA’s conference future are two different matters. Yet there’s a connection as well. If UCLA can’t get this football thing right -- and it’s struggled mightily to do it in the 30 post-Terry Donahue years -- then its status as a rock-solid Big Ten entity is always going to be in doubt. It's hard to imagine a more searing indictment of UCLA football than Kelly's voluntary departure as a head coach two years ago to a coordinator position at Ohio State.

Historically, UCLA has dragged around at least two millstones. Its football team plays its home games at the Rose Bowl, 26 miles from the Westwood campus. And fan support is, even in the good times, thin and insouciant. (To put it another way, the Bruins don’t travel when they play in El Paso at the Sun Bowl.)

Athletically, the school is a paradox. It has won 124 national championships and features some of sport’s most famous figures – Jackie Robinson, Rafer Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (at UCLA, Lew Alcindor). There’s proof of sporting superiority. Yet there’s a sort of patrician vibe around campus about athletics, that it doesn’t matter so much.

You could argue that’s a good thing – except when you look at the balance sheet. The Bruins have been hemorrhaging money for years, and in May, Kathy Bawn, chair of the UCLA academic senate, penned a letter to the chancellor expressing “profound concern about significant ongoing transfer of funds from the campus budget to UCLA Athletics at a time when the academic mission confronts damaging austerity.”

The school recently ran a $219-million deficit over six years, and it transferred $30 million from the general fund to athletics in the fiscal year ending in 2024.

As we speak, that deficit isn’t being eased by UCLA’s $10-million annual payment to Cal over a three-year period, for absconding to the Big Ten and leaving a sister UC-system school in the lurch (the lurch being the ACC).

Annual payouts of $75 million, and rising, from the Big Ten, will salve some of that deficit, but it still seems an uneasy arrangement that doesn’t address a bigger problem.

So if you’re UCLA, you hire on the cheap (relatively speaking, of course). You hire former Bruin running back Deshaun Foster, who had a thin resume in about a decade as an assistant coach, and who punctuated his first appearance at Big Ten media days a year ago with a memorably halting introduction. He said, “I’m sure you don’t know much about UCLA – the football program. We’re in LA. Us, and um, USC. (Long pause). We um … (giggling softly, then another long pause). I’m just basically excited, that’s it.”

Last week came the arrest and suspension of backup quarterback Pierce Clarkson, in an unspecified felony allegation. Clarkson had come from Ole Miss, and before that, Louisville.

All of it seems so out of step for UCLA – this jarring new world of college athletics, the transfer portal, NIL – like a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit. Last winter among the nation’s basketball coaches, who was most outspoken about travel in the rejiggered conference map? That was the Bruins’ Mick Cronin, who noted that Big Ten teams come to LA once a season, while “we have to go back (east of the Mississippi) four times. We’ve seen the Statue of Liberty (landing on airplanes) twice in the last three weeks.”

In that vein, Cronin later pointed out that UCLA places a higher priority on academics than some of their adversaries, so increased travel for student-athletes is a greater challenge.

Students of UCLA athletics recognize this for what it is – a proud school trying to make its way in a confounding new landscape, and not managing it very well.

Ever the marketing mavens, ESPN occasionally trots out a slogan for its television offerings. You know, “Feast Week,” or “Championship Week,” or “Separation Saturday.”
For those slow to get a start on their college-football seasons, I’d propose another marker: “Sobering Saturday.”

You know who you are. If you didn’t throw out a complete clunker in your opener last week, you lurched about so badly against Ipswich State, the coach’s call-in radio show required extra producers to have the seven-second delay at the ready.

I think it’s the great leveling effect of the off-season. The eight-month break from football tends to blur memories and smooth over frown wrinkles. Say you go 4-8 in 2024, but you have a history of winning seasons, at least sporadically. Your season ends and the in-and-out of the transfer portal happens, and your team undergoes something of what’s become kind of the inevitable makeover.

You go through off-season conditioning and then spring workouts, and the coach addresses daily developments with the media in spring practice.

A brush of optimism tends to take hold, often emanating from that coach, because the marketing people don’t like it if he says, “To tell you the truth, I think we’re gonna be awful.”

At conference media day, at least one player will say, “We’re a lot closer than we were last year,” and the coach will say, “We came back in the best shape since I’ve been here.”

August practices get shut down to outsiders, because, of course, the identity of the backup gunner needs to be a state secret. And nobody really knows what’s going on inside, and it could be something good, right?

Everybody is 0-0 in Week One -- Texas-San Antonio and Georgia, Bowling Green and Ohio State. Nobody’s better than anybody else, and hope springs eternal. Then the season starts – for some, with a slap in the face.

Out our way, the remaining Pac-12 members sustained a chilling dose of . . . well, they hope it isn’t reality.

Washington State schlepped to a 13-10 victory over Idaho in Jimmy Rogers’ first game as WSU coach. Even though they feature 70 new players, so much about the Cougars was surprising. The guy everybody assumed was the starting quarterback, Zevi Eckhaus, wasn’t one of the two who took snaps for WSU. The Cougars, rarely a formidable on the ground, took it to extremes, rushing 22 times for three yards. The lead back, Angel Johnson, carried 10 times – for negative yardage.

If it’s possible, down the road Oregon State might have looked even more grim against Cal. The Beavers have generally played pretty salty defense in this era, and in the off-season they landed Duke transfer quarterback Maalik Murphy at a reported $1.5 million, which would cover a good many pints at Clodfelter’s on Monroe in Corvallis. In a game whose line hovered around a tossup, the Beavers went out and got scalded, 34-15. Murphy was 21 of 33 but didn’t throw a touchdown pass, and was spotted on the sideline losing his cool – as columnist John Canzano put it – with offensive assistant Danny Langsdorf.

For perspective, Murphy’s opening-night quarterback rating was 119.7, putting him at 80th nationally.

Imagine how the faithful around UCLA feel (although assuming UCLA has faithful is a bit of a leap). One of the prominent stories of the off-season was quarterback Nico Iamaleava’s “holdout” at Tennessee, leading to his transfer to UCLA, where he is reported to have taken a pay cut to $1.2 million. (It’s probably safe to assume nobody gets a pay raise when they leave the SEC.)

Iamaleava’s welcome to Westwood was a disaster waiting to happen. All he and his teammates had to do was vanquish a Utah team bent on avenging a bad 2024 season, coached by one of the college game’s savants, Kyle Whittingham. The Utes blistered UCLA, 43-10, Iamaleava was a benign 11 of 22 for 136 yards, and before the final stats were tabulated, LA columnists were banging out pieces questioning whether DeShaun Foster, in his second season, could ever lead the Bruins to anything meaningful.

The deeper question around UCLA is why the Bruins have struggled so mightily to find anybody to approach the success of Terry Donahue, who hasn’t been there for 30 years. And whether this move to the Big Ten is a good fit for either side.

That’s a discussion for another day. For teams like WSU, OSU and UCLA, the off-season looks a long way off.

Too Good to Be Through, my sixth book, launches on Labor Day, Sept. 1, and for me, it’s now a 3-3 tie between self-published books, all post-retirement in the past decade, versus the three done earlier with a publisher.

As you might guess, those M.O.’s are a lot different. In a nutshell, my first three were done at the invitation of a publishing company, which does most of the work – uh, well, except for writing the book. But the publisher assigns the work, establishes a deadline, edits the copy, sends you galley proofs and requests that you approve them, and handles most of the marketing.

When you self-publish, you do . . . pretty much all of it. The beauty is in being your own boss. The burden is that everything is on you.

I’m in that marketing phase now – the fun phase – when the book has been put to bed, when everything has been written, edited, fine-tuned, double-checked and is ready to depart the womb (I think) and greet the public.

My first one was done in 1991 in collaboration with Ralph Miller, the former Oregon State Hall of Fame basketball coach, and if you asked me how marketing today differs from marketing then, I’d tell you it’s like the difference in basketball between 2025 and the era when they staged a center jump after every basket.

Suffice to say, my first publisher wasn’t exactly imaginative. Or maybe it was merely cheap. I distinctly recall lobbying it to supply some books around Iowa City and Wichita, Miller’s first two coaching stops, which didn’t seem to me such a radical idea, inasmuch as this was a book in which he was recalling his entire career. And although the book wasn’t coming out until about 20 months after his retirement, the publisher was going to use a candid shot of Miller on the bench – until I gently campaigned for something different, in the form of a nice, newly photographed, pensive shot of him cradling a basketball.

You know, something that actually looked like a coach in retirement. We shelled out $175 for a newspaper photographer with whom I was friends to drive up to Miller’s mountain home in Oregon, do a free-lance shoot, and I split the cost evenly with the publisher.

As for marketing, strictly speaking, about all I recall was a joint signing at the OSU bookstore, and the line ran out well out the door. Have to confess, that was more about Ralph than it was me.

Now the marketing opportunities are manifold, particularly for a book whose subject matter is the major sport at the two biggest universities in Washington. (It’s a book on the Apple Cup football rivalry.)

I’ve already discussed the book on the radio, thanks to KJR 93.3 FM. There have been approaches to do three different podcasts, another one for a fan website, and one more for a pregame radio show on Apple Cup game day Sept. 20. The influence of social media is staggering, from a post and responses on Facebook to posts on X. I’ve come to believe that the dynamic of whether somebody thinks your book will be worth paying for is actually a lot less important than the recognition that it exists.

At any rate, here’s my agenda Sept. 19 and 20. Hope you can be a part of it.

Sept. 19 – Signing from noon to 2 or 3 p.m. at Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 West Main in Spokane. I’ve done a signing in the past at Auntie’s and they’re good people.

Sept. 19 – Signing as part of the WSU Alumni Association’s First Down Friday at Flatstick Pub, 618 West Main in Spokane, from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Sept. 20 – Signing at the Hampton Inn, Pullman, time TBD (about two hours, probably starting in the 8 a.m. hour).

Sept. 20 – Signing at the Crimson and Gray Gathering, WSU Alumni Centre, 1 Alumni Way, tentatively 12:30-1:45 p.m.

Sept. 20 – Signing at the WSU Bookstore, 1500 North Glenn Terrell Mall, Pullman, 2-4 p.m.