A sunny Friday in Pullman
COUGARS
The basketball season gets back into gear tomorrow, with Eastern Washington traveling down U.S. 195 from Cheney to face WSU in the early afternoon. There are still a few football loose ends to clear up, though. Read on.
••••••••••
• Washington State: I love understatement and exaggeration. Just so you know. We'll be getting to basketball later today as we examine the matchup with the Eagles, but for now we need to focus on those "loose ends" with football. ... Last night we linked our stories on Mike Leach's impact on WSU already and what former coach Mike Price believes he'll do in Pullman. We also linked similar stories from the Seattle Times and News Tribune. But we found one more story worth linking. The Lubbock newspaper talked with Leach's former players and they had some advice to pass along to the current Cougars. Other than that, not much more I can pass along on this sunny Pullman morning except the news Leach is scheduled to be on SiriusXM channel 91 at 10 a.m. this morning with Jack Arute.
•••
• Around the Pac-10:The first Pac-12 title game is tonight in Eugene pitting the mighty Oregon Ducks vs. the soon-to-be-coached-by-someone-else UCLA Bruins. In what could have a been a showcase game for the conference, we now have what's expected to be a blowout, done in by USC's probation and the inability of anyone else in the South Division to win a crucial game. ... The coaching carousel continues to turn with Arizona State offering its job to Kevin Sumlin, but the Sun Devils possibly having competition from Texas A&M. UCLA was told no by Chris Petersen, who isn't going anywhere right now. And Arizona's Board of Regents approved Rich Rodriguez's contract. ... In basketball news, Stanford went to Seattle last night and routed the Redhawks, 72-49. ... Washington is embarking on a crucial road trip. ... An Arizona freshman is making a strong bid to be the starter.
•••
• By the way, I just finished getting through Twitter and the comments here and wanted to pass along a couple answers and thoughts. First off, didn't know passing along comments from the eight people we interacted with yesterday would cause such a fuss. No one, and thought we were clear on this, was upset in any way with Leach's hire. Everyone was excited and looking forward to next year – though one person was afraid the ticket prices would rise. But the process, mostly the length of it, seemed to bother them. The consensus was they understood why it had to happen, but just wished Wulff would have been fired on Sunday. They had empathy for him, which you would expect from folks in Pullman. ... One other thing. There have been a lot of questions about the current assistants, so I thought I would reiterate the facts, based on reading their contracts. They all are covered through March 31, 2012, and then they are no longer WSU employees. It's up to Leach to decide if he wants to keep any of them. For now, Steve Morton and Chris Tormey have been asked to stick around with football operations director Shawn Deeds, to keep the program running until Leach and his staff take over.
•••
• That's all for this morning. We'll be back as events warrant. Until later ...
