A GRIP ON SPORTS • Usually, change is good. If there are good reasons for it. A change made yesterday by IMG College, Washington State’s media broadcast partner, doesn’t fit that criteria. Read on.

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• Bud Nameck wasn’t an institution around WSU, not yet, but he certainly fit the loose definition of a “tradition.” For more than two decades he’s been the voce of Cougar basketball and for almost as long he’s been connected to WSU football, the last two seasons as the play-by-play announcer. With that latter role has come the responsibility of being the Cougars’ face on many events and peripheral shows, from the coaches’ weekly talkathon to the same with the athletic director. But that all came to an end yesterday. Suddenly, and to Nameck, out of the blue. IMG College fired Nameck and replaced him with one of its own, Matt Chazanow, who will move from the East Coast to Pullman and became the new “voice of the Cougs.” (Full disclosure here before we go any further: IMG College has employed me the past few years as well, paying me as a freelancer to serve as an analyst in the post-game call-in show following WSU football games.) This move is unsupportable on so many levels it’s hard to enumerate them all. We’ll try, though. No matter what you think of Nameck’s abilities (and that was the unspoken criticism inherent in IMG’s press release on the change), the new guy would have to be an amalgamation of Vin Scully, Ed Murrow and Red Barber to replace the positives Nameck brought to the microphone each game. Chief among those is an institutional memory unparalleled in Bohler Gym. Let’s be honest here. Walk the WSU campus just once and you’ll understand the strength of the university is built upon its traditions. This is a school in which, in a lot of ways, time passed by. Thankfully. Ask any Cougar and they’ll tell you that’s one of the aspects they loved about their college experience and what they still love about their alma mater. But one of those traditions isn’t athletic accomplishment. Sorry, but Washington State hasn’t had a lot of success in football and basketball over the years. So it’s important to keep people around who can share personal memories of the occasional glory days. Bob Robertson fills that role on the football side. Nameck did it on the basketball side. He watched the success Kelvin Sampson and the Bennetts built at Washington State. He could draw on that to make each basketball broadcast during the down years in-between and following that much better. He served the role of a lifeline to the glory years. His knowledge added depth – and kept the fans in touch with the university’s greatest athletic days. That is now lost. Another loss concerns Nameck’s connection to the most important city in WSU’s fanbase: Spokane. Don’t just take my word about Spokane. Athletic director Bill Moos has said it often. For WSU to be successful athletically, for the school to draw significant crowds, for the fundraising base to be expanded, Spokane has to buy in. That’s one of the reasons Moos pushed for Nameck’s expanded football role in the first place. Nameck has been part of the Spokane broadcast scene for more than 30 years, on television and on radio. He currently hosts a morning show on KXLY 920 and is a fixture at events around town. He’s well respected. People in Spokane know Nameck. They’ve invited him into their homes and cars for years. That aspect of this change will be irreplaceable.

• Which brings us to the key question. Why did IMG College make the change? John Blanchette asked the company yesterday and quoted IMG vice president Andrew Giangola in his column this morning. “We’re not going to get into specifics on the decision,” Giangola told Blanchette. “We thought Matt would be a terrific addition to take a good broadcast and bring it up a notch.” And that outweighed everything else? “Take it up a notch.” Really? As Blanchette says, the football broadcast wasn’t perfect. There were problems, but the roots of those problems weren’t going to change much even if IMG had hired a young Keith Jackson and put him in the booth. (Though Jackson would have the WSU diploma to fall back on, something even Nameck or Bob Robertson don’t even have – though they both have become honorary Cougs by now.) The setup is a bit ungainly anyway and different from most college broadcasts. But an incremental improvement – a “notch” seems incremental by definition – isn’t enough to outweigh the losses, or to explain the change. It’s common knowledge around Bohler IMG didn’t want Nameck in the football booth in the first place. Moos pushed for the change because Nameck had earned his shot. He was the ultimate “good soldier” – still is, if you’ve followed what he’s had to say since yesterday – who WSU needed to reward. But IMG, by virtue of its more than $30-million, 10-year media-rights contract with Washington State, gets to call the shots. Sources have said the company, despite misgivings, consented. After Nameck’s first year, IMG pushed again. Nameck agreed to some training and there were changes made. Finally, this summer IMG insisted. Nameck is out. Look, this isn’t as important a change as the football coach or the basketball coach or even whatever coach. We all get that. Those decisions are made, have to be made, with the win/lose bottom line as the primary goal. Changes like this, it’s harder to define winning and losing. IMG believes a better broadcast, even an incrementally better one, will help the financial bottom line. That’s what matters to a conglomerate. But that logic is hard to fathom. Will increased sales really follow this change, a change that has to be costing the company at least a little coin to move and embed one of its own to Pullman? And will they offset the losses in areas, including goodwill (a nebulous factor, I know) and exposure in the Spokane market? And was it all worth it, considering the positives Nameck brought to the position? I doubt it.

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• WSU: There was other news yesterday as well. Jacob Thorpe has a blog post on the newcomers in Pullman for the Bridge Program. He, of course, also had the Nameck news, as did CougCenter and Cougfan. ... ESPN.com’s Pac-12 blog lists the best wins for the North division’s quarterbacks.

• Indians: Spokane is on a roll and it rolled over Boise again last night, 9-0. Chris Derrick has the game story and a blog post on the rout.

• Shock: Who will play quarterback this week for Spokane? Jim Meehan looks at that question in this week’s notebook.

• Seahawks: Who will replace Marshawn Lynch, one of the NFL’s best running backs, when the time comes?

• Mariners: Want to know the baseball definition of “wasted opportunities?” That would be 0-for-14 with runners in scoring position. Or what the M’s did yesterday in a 5-4 loss to Detroit. ... Would Logan Morrison have helped? Maybe, but he was given the day off. ... Speaking of days off, would Robinson Cano have benefitted from a few more? ... Austin Jackson had to leave the game yesterday. ... Jesus Sucre, what a bunter. ... I feel old often. But this story, about the person who will be throwing out the first pitch Saturday, makes me feel positively middle aged.

• Sounders: MLS teams will have more money to spend to acquire players. ... Real Salt Lake has to replace a big hole in the middle during the Gold Cup.

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• I’m headed to the West Side tomorrow. How has the weather been? Until later ..

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