The other night, after departing a book signing at the Duchess in the university district (big shout-out to the staff there, and to a lively crowd), I spent much of the night listening to the broadcast of the Washington-UCLA football game. You know, the one between one program that seems to be going somewhere (if the coach doesn’t go somewhere first), and the one that seems to be . . . well, where the hell exactly is UCLA headed, now that it’s made this boffo, dynamic, forward-leaning move to the Big Ten?

In that second half, I heard the UW play-by-play guy, Tony Castricone, refer to “today,” – as in, “Demond Williams has 64 yards rushing today,” at least half a dozen times. This, despite the fact it was 10:15 p.m. and we still hadn’t breached the fourth quarter. (But you’ve gotta love the Pac-12-After-Dark notes.)

In other words, it was nighttime, which, unless the city of Pasadena has domed the Rose Bowl since the Bruins last played there Nov. 8, ought to have been evident to anybody sitting in a radio booth.

Since I wrote about this topic maybe a decade ago, I’m convinced it’s gotten worse. We don’t seem to be able to distinguish today from tonight. Announcers have misplaced the mental faculties required in discerning whether it’s daytime or nighttime, and no amount of rehearsing gets it right.

This is serious business, and I’m on a crusade to be made whole. I’ve written my Congressmen and women, I’ve made impassioned statements in front of city councils, I’ve led Saturday protests. I’ve consulted attorneys. I’ve even written the White House, believing that anybody who can put an end to 73 wars should be able to solve this problem.

Actually, I’ve done none of that. I’ve mostly just done a lot of caterwauling when the car radio informs me that “We’ve had a lot of unforced errors tonight,” just after the announcer notes that a receiver might have dropped the ball because he was looking into the sun.

I’m convinced it’s getting worse. Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I was listening to a radio broadcast of a college-basketball opener and was struck by how the announcer kept referencing “tonight,” even though it was maybe 2 o’clock (in the afternoon, not a.m.). In succeeding years, I’ve vowed to keep a season-long running tally of how many times basketball announcers tangle the time of day. Because I tend to watch a lot of college basketball, I usually give up the ghost by Thanksgiving.

These days, a disturbing trend has become exasperating. Used to be, you’d mostly hear the misstep from basketball announcers, inside a building without windows. That was bad enough; however cloistered they might be inside a gym, wouldn’t you think the average person has sort of a native impulse telling him/her whether it’s daytime or night?

Now you increasingly hear game announcers, staring out at a football field where the shadows are minimal and people in the stands are wearing sunglasses, saying, “That Joe Bob Jenkins has been a real workhorse tonight.”

Let’s scrutinize this further. I’m pretty sure the misuse of “tonight” when “today” is correct is much more prevalent than vice versa. And I suppose announcers blurting “today” when midnight is approaching will rationalize it by saying that’s technically correct, because “today” covers all 24 hours, right?

That’s a cop-out. On July Fourth, do we say, “Yeah, we’re going to the fireworks today.”? Do we say, “We’re going out to dinner today.”? When’s the last time you heard anybody say, “We’re going to go trick-or-treating today.”?

By now you’re channeling the old (1969) Chicago tune, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?”

I’d contend that back then, they did.

As college football’s regular season winds down in the Evergreen State, I’m looking at two fan bases of its highest-level programs who are discomfited lately by events around their teams. Of course, they’re of a completely different ilk, which is proper and expected of two whose Apple Cup rivalry I termed the most distinctive in the country in my recent book, “Too Good to Be Through.”

On Montlake, the locals were salved a bit by the Huskies’ scalding of Purdue, a week after the season went south at Wisconsin. Of more overriding intrigue is the status of the head coach, Jedd Fisch, whose itinerant track record and whose circuitous description of his future at the UW leaves some Husky fans wondering.

Last week, a day before Fisch attempted to quash rumors that he might leave, Jordan Reffett, former UW defensive tackle and an active participant on X (the former Twitter), wrote, “It pisses me off Fisch hasn’t come out publicly and said he loves his job at the University of Washington, and yes, coaching is a crazy (profession) but I see myself here for a long time. Recruits need to hear this also. Get in front of the media Monday and s--- or get off the pot.”

In answer to a question, Fisch indeed did address his status at the UW. But a lot of it was coach-speak, hardly a denial of interest in any other job. Reffett responded by softening his comments and saying he’s “100 percent behind Coach Fisch and his staff.”

But there seems to be a widespread sense that Fisch isn’t long for Montlake, once a coaching non sequitur at the UW but now, seemingly, part of the cost of doing business.

Somewhere along the way, apparently, Washington quit being a destination job and transitioned to a waystation. Darrell Royal left the UW after one year for Texas way back in 1956, followed by 18-year stints from two guys who won national championships at Washington, Jim Owens and Don James. Each had his chances to leave.

It was all the way to the 21st century that there was a coach with wandering eyes, and that was Rick Neuheisel. He dabbled in a Notre Dame opening and interviewed with the San Francisco 49ers, which, eventually and ironically, helped lead to his firing at Washington after he lied about the dalliance.

Kalen DeBoer departed the UW for Alabama after the 2023 season, unbowed by the pressures of that job. Now Fisch can rewrite the common narrative of his future here, but the betting seems to be on him taking a powder as well.

Maybe the desirability of the UW job hasn’t changed, but the times have. Maybe realignment has made the odds longer at Washington. Maybe being a West Coast member of a conference based in the Midwest isn’t optimal.

In any case, it’s unsettling for many Washington fans. The older ones grew up in an era when there were no pro sports, when the Huskies ruled the local sportsscape. Now their coaches land on lists of possible replacements, like Washington was Memphis or Tulane or Western Kentucky.

Or … Louisiana Tech, the team that ventured to Washington State to meet the Cougars Saturday night in this weird, out-of-body, 2025 experience WSU is having.

Jim Moore, the uber-Coug and my old Post-Intelligencer teammate, posted a video of the crowd at Martin Stadium and commented, “Sad.” Hard to judge for certain, but there might not have been 10,000 people there.

But was it sad because realignment has visited a season from hell on the Cougars, forcing upon them a jerry-rigged schedule while they await the coming of the cavalry from the Mountain West? Or are we saying it was sad because a lot of old November challenges came home to roost on the program?

In that vein, who said the following? “There’s no such thing as Cougar spirit. To those who support us, God bless you. To hell with everybody else who talks spirit and not support, because I’m getting sick and tired of having to overcome this.”

That was Coach Jim Walden, who turned his loquaciousness on his own fans way back in mid-November1983, a couple of days after WSU drew 15,000 while beating Cal with a team that finished 7-4 and on a five-game winning streak.

The point is, these late-season attendance issues have dogged WSU for a lot longer than anybody began thinking USC would make for a perfect fit in the Big Ten.

 In 1988, the year the Cougars upended top-ranked UCLA on the road, they put 19,702 in the place Nov. 12, needing a win over Oregon State to secure their first bowl since 1981.

 In 1992, two weeks before the renowned Snow Bowl, WSU, en route to a 9-3 season, drew 15,441 to play Arizona State on Nov. 7.

 Amid two bowl seasons in 2021 and 2024, they did 17,000 and change in November for Arizona and Wyoming.

No doubt the jangled 2025 season with its cockeyed schedule plays into this, and so does a team that’s not successful on a grand scale. Take a look at WSU attendance over the years in November, and it’s pretty consistently boffo when the Cougars are, too. But I can’t muster a lot of sympathy for the notion that people who won’t drive dark, wet (or icy) two-lane roads for hours in late season are somehow letting the program down. (Attendance-shaming on message boards threatens to become as much of a tradition at WSU as Ferdinand’s.)

I can’t think of another program in the country that depends more on people who must travel a considerable distance. It was relatively mild weather Saturday night, you say? But how do you know that when you’re making plans on Tuesday or Wednesday? Meanwhile, rooms are hard to find, and if you locate one, it’s at a price that’s skyrocketed faster than the cost of a decent deep snapper.

Fans decry the night games that dot the schedule and require sacrifice and midnight drives. But schools pant after the TV paychecks they get for playing late games.

College football must be a hell of a sport. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Late Thursday, an American League fan base is going to be in a froth. Count on it.

That’s when the 30-man U.S. Baseball Writers Association panel voting for American League MVP is going to be announced. It’s Aaron Judge of the Yankees or Cal Raleigh of the Mariners, and boosters of the loser in this competition are going to want to burn it all down.

Judge is phenomenal. Raleigh is sensational. What’s a voter to do?

I have the perfect, imperfect solution:

Judge and Raleigh split the award down the middle. Each gets a piece. They both win.

Ah, you say, we’re copping out. We’re taking the easy path.

Maybe so. But it might be the only fair resolution.

There’s precedent, you realize. Back in 1979, the writers covering the National League named co-MVPs – Willie Stargell, the Pirates slugger, and Keith Hernandez, the slick-fielding, high-average Cardinal. Both were first baseman. Stargell hit 32 homers, drove in a modest 82 runs, with an average of .281. Hernandez homered 11 times, drove in 105 and hit .344 to win the batting title.

To an aging, college-basketball scribe, this calls to mind 20 years ago, when J.J. Redick of Duke and Adam Morrison of Gonzaga waged a crazy, memorable coast-to-coast duel of long-range one-upmanship. For weeks, it was a game of can-you-top-this? Redick went for 41 points one Saturday in December, and a few hours later, Morrison cut into Redick's ESPN face time by banking in a deep shot to beat Oklahoma State.

Weeks later, Redick had a 41-point game and Morrison matched him two days later. Soon after, Redick went for 40 and the same day, on a different coast, Morrison posted 42.

It was terrific theater. Sports Illustrated’s cover one week posed them back-to-back and asked, “Who’s the best?”

There was no wrong answer. Yes, Redick was doing it in the ACC and Morrison in the WCC. But in a two-week span, Morrison dropped 43 in a triple-overtime screamer over Michigan State in the Maui Invitational and matched himself in a high-level loss at Washington.

At the Final Four in Indianapolis, word was out that the U.S. Basketball Writers were splitting their vote for player of the year. I ran into the late Jim O’Connell, the AP’s college-basketball writer from New York, legendarily both crusty and beloved.

“Why can’t we just name one winner?” he complained, as a mission statement.

I get that thinking. But sometimes the circumstances just shout otherwise. Judge-Raleigh is one of those. It’s going to be borderline criminal for either to be runner-up.

Judge dominated American League hitting numbers. He won the batting title at .331. He had 53 homers, a lusty .457 on- base percentage and a thunderous OPS of 1.144.

Raleigh hit 60 regular-season homers, in what's known as a pitcher's pari. He hit 25 percent more of them than any player in history at the catcher position. He obliterated Mickey Mantle’s record for homers by a switch-hitter. And in hitting 60, he made it a cozy foursome of players to do that absent the stain of steroids, joining Judge, Roger Maris and Babe Ruth.

The analytics folk will argue for Judge, but the delicious part of this debate is, it’s not about analytics. Happily, I think, we’re left to sort out what the rigors of catching do to diminish that player as a hitter.

Imagine coming to the park, and you want to work on some nettlesome little aspect of your swing that’s not quite right. But wait, you’ve got to be a voice at the pre-game pitchers meetings, and oh yeah, you wanted to spend some time with Logan Gilbert, just you and he, discussing whether he’s relying too much on the breaking ball and whether he’s better being a power pitcher.

How many games does a catcher not add some physical impertinence to the collection of affronts to his body? Five, 10 maybe, where there isn’t a foul tip to a finger or a wayward bat recoiling into his shoulder or a spiked splitter that comes up and bites him in the groin? There’s a reason no catcher had ever hit more than 48 homers before 2025.

Judge, nursing an elbow injury, played 56 games as a designated hitter. Raleigh played 38 as a DH among his 159 games. A year ago, Raleigh won the American League Platinum Glove award, and his stellar fielding didn’t just go away a year later.

Judge has won the MVP in both 2022 and 2024. For Raleigh, this is probably it as an MVP candidate, with a once-in-a-career kind of year unseen in baseball history at his position.

The Big Dumper or Judge?

Both deserve it. At least, half of it.

The 11th inning morphed into the 12th, and the 12th gave way to the 13th.

Surely, this marathon between the Dodgers and Blue Jays last Monday night would only take another inning. Or so I told myself.

If only a person knew in the 11th that it was going to go 18, you could easily just click the thing off. But it entices you into one more, and you become a junkie, certain everything’s going to be settled with just one more inning.

Of course, it finally ended a scant few minutes before midnight – on the Pacific Coast, that is. In Toronto, that’s a mere few minutes before 3 a.m., and we can be fairly convinced that not a lot of schoolkids in Ontario there were awake to see it.

Nor were their parents.

It was an extreme night, to be sure, but in the East, even if the game ends after two hours, which would be pretty unusual, that’s 10 p.m., when most kids are in bed, and a whole lot of the working world is as well.

It called to mind something I heard recently on a sports-talk show. The host was recalling how his late father loved day baseball in the major-league playoffs. It’s a bygone thing, a period piece, de rigueur when we were kids but now gone the way of the wall phone.

Funny thing. It seems incongruous to have some day baseball in today’s playoffs. We have to have night baseball, and it only makes sense. It’s when people can watch, not at 1:30 in the afternoon when they’re teaching history or installing rivets for Boeing or packaging cardboard boxes at Amazon.

It occurred to me, though, that the appearance of day baseball in 2025 makes it, counterintuitively, important. And thus, cool. At points early in the playoffs, there are too many games to contest at night, so they’re played in daylight. They’re different. That attaches an exclamation point to them, and instead of diminishing their impact, it adds to it.

And for those of a certain age, it takes us back.

In third grade, in early October in Connecticut, I shooshed noisily through a mantle of autumn leaves and made my way back to our duplex, where somebody was excited about what had just happened in the World Series. I didn’t understand what it meant, Don Larson throwing a perfect game for the Dodgers against the Yankees.

A couple of years later, on afternoon TV, there were the Dodgers, now in Los Angeles, hosting the go-go White Sox in a silly, makeshift Coliseum with a 250-foot distance down the leftfield line, made equitable in somebody’s mind by a 40-foot fence. It was probably appealing to a kid because it resembled Wiffleball.

In 1960, I was in Mrs. Wellstead’s seventh-grade math class when Bill Mazeroski unspooled his winning home run against the Yankees, except nobody called it a walk-off back then. I’m pretty sure there was some goofball running with him around the bases, because around history’s biggest home runs, there usually was. What I committed to memory was that the Yankees lost that Series in seven despite outscoring the Pirates, 55-27.

And then a couple of years later, I had a problem with a neck muscle that caused me to miss school for the first time in six years. On the bright side, I was able to catch World Series Game 6 between New York and San Francisco, delayed four days in the Bay Area by heavy rains.

For some reason, the rest of the World Series in the ‘60s, day-baseball-style, don’t register with me quite so indelibly. And in 1971, Pittsburgh hosted Baltimore in the first Series game at night.

Day baseball in the playoffs was gradually on its way out, the forces of television exerting their inevitable influence. Fifty-four years later, in a game between two good-hitting teams that couldn’t seem to assemble a run, Toronto damn near had some day baseball on TV again.

Eight days ago, just after the Mariners had taken a 2-0 series lead on the road en route to what loomed as a disposal of the Blue Jays, I happened into the local Costco. At the entry door, a hard-bitten-looking woman, up in years, called to her counterpart on the other side.

“Have we ever won the World Series?” she rasped.

If she didn’t know it then, she knows the answer now: No, they haven’t. Because they haven’t gotten there.

It seemed odd Monday night when Fox TV announcer Joe Davis described Toronto’s 32-year absence from the World Series as “painful.” Maybe it’s my advancing years, but that doesn’t seem so long ago. Hell, I even remember where I was when Joe Carter launched his walk-off homer to win the Jays their second straight title.

You want pain, go to the seventh inning of ALCS Game 7, when Eduard Bazardo coughed up George Springer’s three-run homer to send the Mariners home, yet again without a berth in the World Series. Mariner deprivation from the Fall Classic is now measured in half-centuries – next season will be the 50th of the club’s existence.

Pick your whipping boy: Bazardo, Dan Wilson, bad luck. This looked like a tired baseball team as the playoffs wore on, and the injury to Bryan Woo was pivotal. The Mariner starters were mostly nails against Detroit, but except for Bryce Miller twice and George Kirby in Game 7, missing in action against the Blue Jays.

It’s cruelly fitting that the luscious prospect of the World Series gives way to another crashing disappointment. This was a mercurial Mariner season. Believe it or not, this team was swept in a three-game series eight times. It dived, it rose, it plummeted again, like a carnival ride broken loose, ultimately rescued in the regular season by the 17 wins-in-18-games heater.

There’s something missing here, and for lack of a better term, I think it’s between the ears. A club so reliant on analytics can’t seem to move a runner from second to third with a productive out, and in most cases, it doesn’t seem to try. It doesn’t run the bases well. Guys get picked off. Leo Rivas got picked off in Game 4 of the Toronto series, and it very nearly happened again to him in Game 6.

The overall baseball IQ seems lacking. On Sept. 3 at Tampa, the Mariners were retired in the first inning on three pitches. Who allows that to happen?

They’ve become a power-hitting team that seems to rely on the long ball to the exclusion of common sense. The bunt is almost obsolete, left to be scorned by the analytics honks.

Attention to detail seems wanting, and if I’m Dan Wilson, the first day of spring training in February, I’m preaching the need to do the little things right.

I hope the post-season run is a pointed reminder to Mariner ownership: Look what can happen if you spend a little money. You don’t need to be like the Mets or Dodgers, just be in this thing. You owned the city in September and October. The crowds at T-Mobile Park were electric. You couldn’t go anywhere in the region without seeing Mariner gear.

On October 21, I don’t think it’s unfair to say the off-season will be a failure if they don’t re-sign Josh Naylor. On the other hand, I wouldn’t bring back Geno Suarez, despite the wonderful clubhouse presence. He hit .186 in August, .190 in September, and notwithstanding his mammoth, memorable Game 5 against Toronto, .213 in the post-season. And he’s 34.

Jorge Polanco, 32, was a revelation but can choose free agency rather than picking up a player option for 2026 at $6 million. If he returns, the jigsaw puzzle must account for Cole Young, who seems ready to become a fixture at second base. Perhaps Polanco then becomes a half-time designated hitter.

But that discussion is somewhere near “acceptance” on the continuum of grieving’s five stages. Right now, we’re swimming in denial/anger/depression.

On a light-rail platform near the stadium after Game 3, I overheard a fellow lamenting the state of affairs, when the Blue Jays won 13-4 and began chasing down the Mariners.
“It’s my birthday,” he said. “The worst thing is, they lost that 18-inning game [the 1-0 marathon to the Astros in 2022] the same day.”

Heavy as the crash feels today, I have to think the Mariner brass is salivating at what’s to come, the idea of melding the current roster with a gaggle of Top 100 prospects – Colt Emerson, Laz Montes, Michael Arroyo, Jonny Farmelo, Kade Anderson, etc.

“This feels like a beginning, not the end,” ESPN analyst Jeff Passan told 710 radio here Tuesday, “It’ll happen in the next five years.”

And among Mariner faithful, what’s five years?

As Oregon State was lurching to a 39-14 loss Saturday, amid dwindling fans and pointed player post-game comments about teammates having checked out, something alluring was taking place in Oxford, Miss.

Hard by the world’s best tailgating spot, Washington State was giving fourth-ranked Ole Miss a devil of a time. Certainly, the thought of the Cougars wasn’t going to rile the Rebels to a fever pitch during a season diet that includes Georgia and LSU, but this was fetching nonetheless, a 32-point underdog leading late in the third quarter, and ultimately having an outside chance with the ball, down a field goal, on the game’s last possession.

If there were ever a definition for a moral victory, this was it.

There’s no column in the standings for that, but it’s worth assessing the two Pac-12 orphans midway through the 2025 season.

It’s a bizarro existence this year for WSU and OSU, one visiting Ole Miss and Virginia in mid-October, the other hosting Lafayette. This is the transition season for these two, when they’re biding time until the reinforcements arrive from the Mountain West – Boise State, Fresno State, etc., etc. – next season to form the new Pac-12.

All of it was brought about, as you know, by the 2023 crumbling of the old Pac-12 just before that season began. Amid the wreckage, the popular construct for the long-term, best-case scenario for the Castaways was this: Pick up the pieces, somehow stay competitive in the interim until the next round of TV negotiations at the end of the decade, and hope you get the right answer if another realignment takes place.

A piece of that equation, maybe a tiny slice, surely played a part in the decision last weekend to fire OSU coach Trent Bray after half a season of fruitless outcomes. You’re never on solid ground with an 0-7 record and grumbling near the surface, but big picture, it wasn’t a good look nationally for the Beavers, jettisoned from their longtime West Coast brethren only two years ago, and now, seemingly, dramatically unable to cope.

Taking the temperature both in Corvallis and Pullman this week – and it’s the definition of fluid – you’d have to say the Cougars are managing better than the Beavers.

Since the cataclysm of 2023, when Washington and Oregon departed the Pac-12 and the whole thing came crashing down, it has seemed like OSU and WSU have been sort of leapfrogging each other, if incrementally.

The Beavers got the jump in ’23. Jonathan Smith’s program had reached maturity, and when it came to Pullman in late September, it was 14th ranked. The Cougars finished off OSU to go 4-0, but while the Beavers forged ahead to a bowl game and an 8-5 record, WSU bid adieu to its century-old Pac-12 affiliation with a six-game losing streak and finished 5-7.

Smith saw the bold-faced handwriting on the wall and bolted Corvallis after that season, famously leaving his orange-and-black gear at the local Goodwill. Bray debuted with a 5-7 record in 2024. Meanwhile, Jake Dickert’s outfit had fully bloomed under quarterback John Mateer, and the Cougars were 8-1 in mid-November and meriting isolated mention as a rogue playoff contender.

They nosedived from there, finishing 8-5, but while the Beavers sat home, WSU landed in the Holiday Bowl and lost to Syracuse. This time, it was Dickert turning tail to Wake Forest, and his version of a trip to Goodwill was a tweet of him and his family in flight to Winston-Salem, with Pullman in his rearview mirror.

All this should have augured an edge to the Beavers in 2025. Its coach had settled in, and OSU had attracted quarterback Maalik Murphy from Duke for a reported $1.5 million. Up north, WSU’s Jimmy Rogers, imported from South Dakota State, was dealing with 70 new faces.

But the narrative got knocked kittywampus. Bray turned out to be a disaster, rough around the edges, spewing an F-bomb on a TV interview, seemingly the classic fine assistant coach in over his head in the big chair. On the other hand, while Rogers’ trip has hardly been seamless – especially in a 59-10 loss at North Texas – he has the Cougars at 3-3 ahead of a difficult test Saturday at Virginia. One of the wins was a blowout that gave San Diego State its only loss, another victory at Colorado State was by 17 points, same margin by which Washington thwarted the Rams.

It’s best not to draw any sweeping conclusions. The Cougars are facing the back end of consecutive cross-country road trips this week, and big picture, the belief is that OSU has raised more cash for the war chest that pays players.

But for now, at least WSU can say it’s in solid position to make a bowl game. After all, it has two games left with the Beavers.

Oregon State, of all schools, Sunday joined the parade of college-football programs sending a head coach to the soup lines – figuratively, you understand – before the season even hits mid-October. Trent Bray went 0-7 this year, and if there can be much doubt, it wasn’t a particularly pretty 0-7, so I can’t say I blame the Beavers.

But I’ve got a lot of history covering that program four and five decades ago, and it’s sort of funny to think how truly terrible it was a lot of those years, and nobody ever thought to fire a coach in mid-season. Think about a program that through 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982 never won more than a game a year.

I covered a game infamous in the state of Oregon, the 0-0 Civil War tie between the Ducks and Beavers in 1983. And afterward, a few of us stood before Joe Avezzano, the OSU coach, who campaigned to save his job off that heavy-underdog performance -- despite the fact his four-year record was 4-38-2.

Damned if he didn’t get another year. (He went 2-9 in 1984 for a five-year record of 6-47-2, and by that point, there was pretty much no point in campaigning.)

So the Beavers are going to be hiring a coach again, and I’ve got a name for them:

Jerry Neuheisel. Don’t roll your eyes.

Yes, the resume is thin, and one of the problems with Bray was, he’d never been a head coach, either. Neuheisel’s portfolio actually isn’t as profuse as was Bray’s; he became a coordinator only two weeks ago, when UCLA began authoring the season’s nuttiest turnaround, going from last rites to jumping off the gurney and popping the skeptics in the face.

The Bruins went 0-4, losing to New Mexico 35-10 as a 15-point favorite, and they fired Deshaun Foster. There was speculation in the Los Angeles Times that it looked like a team ripe to go 0-12.

Post-Foster, the Bruins hired Tim Skipper as interim head coach. He’d been on staff since July. Things happen fast these days.

Neuheisel, tight ends coach, was named offensive coordinator. Lo and behold, the Bruins scored 42 points and pulled the rug out from under Penn State, and just pantsed a favored Michigan State team on the road, 38-13.

Not that Oregon State would want an offensive mind producing teams that score 40 points a game or anything. Or somebody who apparently is so beloved by the players that they carried him off and doused him after the Penn State shocker.

Neuheisel has worked only at Texas A&M in a quality-control role, and at UCLA. As recently as the pandemic, he was a mere graduate assistant there.

Him getting a head-coaching job at 33 would exactly match his father, Rick, who was tapped at Colorado at that age before stints at Washington and UCLA – and of course, in a King County courtroom in 2005, where he prevailed over the Huskies and the NCAA after a controversial firing at the UW.

As coaching resumes go, Jerry Neuheisel’s surely is skimpy. But he’s been around a head coach all his life (and ostensibly knows some of the guard rails Rick became known for tumbling over), he’s a recruiter who knows the LA area, and now he’s having madcap success as a coordinator. Foster thought enough of him to give him the added title of assistant head coach, a role that covers a lot of the administrative duties of the head coach.

Of course, the idea of him going to Oregon State is shot-in-the-dark stuff. It’s unlikely it would all line up: Him being interested, the Beavers being interested. He’ll probably draw some post-season curiosity from other group-of-five programs. In any case, it would be a ballsy move on the part of OSU, but with its flagship program teetering in a typhoon era of college athletics, the Beavers might be advised to do something out of the box.

Meanwhile, in the interim, the OSU program is in the hands of Robb Akey, a staffer who was a popular defensive coach under Mike Price and Bill Doba at Washington State. He’s a good man and a straight shooter. He also has head-coaching experience, having been the chief guy at Idaho before and after the turn of the century. He was only 20-50, but that was perennially undermanned Idaho when it was swimming in FBS waters. He’s one of three coaches to have taken the Vandals to a bowl game.

No doubt Akey’s brass voice is already ringing through the halls of Gill Coliseum, where they answer to his ubiquitous name for everybody: “Bubba.”

He’s energetic and should breathe some life into a moribund situation. For the long term, just maybe there’s a coach’s kid in LA who could do the same.

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.