A.D. Tries To Find Cougars Home Away From Home

So Paul Allen doesn’t want his football team playing in the Kingdome.

Fine. Rick Dickson does.

Perhaps as soon as Aug. 30. Perhaps not until 1998.

But sooner or later, the Washington State Cougars will be taking a home football game to Seattle on an almost annual basis - a Dickson brainstorm that makes sense, but could also make him a bigger pariah here on the East Side than if the family dog were a Malamute.

“I’m certainly willing to take the risk of changing the status quo,” Dickson said, “and whether we do it this year or the next, one of these scenarios will be the right one.”

As for this particular scenario, well, WSU’s athletic director can already see the blinking light of his voice mail - if not the smoke from his smoldering effigy.

You may have noticed - if you’re the organized type who doesn’t wait until September to scrounge a hotel room for Dad’s Day - that the traditional announcement of Wazzu’s fall football schedule is about two months tardy. Dickson has been busy trying to rearrange an inherited mess that had the Cougs on the road until Oct. 18. Then there was some dickering with Syracuse over a proposed season-opener on ESPN that unraveled, and a mission to get the Cougars a sixth home game.

And now that he has - Southwestern Louisiana will fill out Wazzu’s datebook - Dickson’s mulling over moving the UCLA game of Nov. 8 to Labor Day weekend and playing it in the Kingdome on ABC instead of at Martin Stadium.

We’ll pause briefly while the outraged towel the coffee off their ties.

It still may not come to pass, but you get the feeling Dickson wants it to - if for no other reason than to make this a vehicle and not just a vision. “We’ll know within a few days,” Dickson said. “We’ve asked UCLA to move it to Aug. 30 unconditionally and let us figure out the best place for it. They’d say yes right now if we’d say we’re going to play it in the Kingdome. But it’s our home game and we’d like to make it our decision where it’s played.”

Dickson has been pouring the footings for this project almost from the day he took the job three years ago, when he decided the biggest contribution he could make to Mike Price’s football program is to wean it from “guarantee games, or what I call bye games,” Dickson said.

Or what everybody else calls body bag games.

Those trips - to Michigan, Tennessee, Ohio State - net WSU a large cash guarantee and a near-guaranteed loss, though Price is 3-6 in such outings. Dickson is sure the percentage would improve if the contracts were home-and-home - and though he’s not going to get Tennessee out here anytime soon, Illinois is coming in 1998 and Colorado in 2000.

Which is to say, they’re probably coming to Seattle.

“When we have the luxury of a sixth home game, we’ll consider moving a non-conference game to the West side,” Dickson said. “The idea is to make the finances work. Instead of going to Illinois for $300,000, at least conceptually, we’ll have the chance to sell 60,000 tickets in the Kingdome. That’s a risk, but I’d rather take that risk than keep putting us in those payday games that do more damage than good.”

Way back when, of course, Wazzu used to move games all the time - to Spokane. The Cougs also played three home games in Seattle in the 1970s, two against USC and one against Ohio State. They lost all three. In Spokane, they won 11 of 29 from 1970-83.

The difference is, the Seattle games drew an average of 44,000 fans. The Spokane games averaged 26,750 - and six of those were Apple Cups.

Dickson will never move a game to Spokane and shouldn’t, not as long as Martin Stadium is bigger than anything here. And Seattle games are only for schedules that show six home games.

“What I’m trying to get across to people is that we’re not taking something away here,” he said. “The games we played in Ann Arbor or Chicago - those have never been played back here.

There’s never been any thought those games could be played in Pullman. If we can get 50,000 people cheering for the Cougars in Seattle, that’s got to be preferable to playing on someone else’s campus.”

But wait. The UCLA game is played in Pullman, every other year.

In pushing to start the Seattle shuttle this year, Dickson has chiseled his own rock and hard place. For he knows he’s not going to sell 40,000 tickets - much less 50,000 or 60,000 - in Seattle for a game against Southwestern Louisiana or Boise State. He couldn’t make an attractive nonconference marriage this fall, so he’s proposing moving the most salable Pac-10 game “and that’s not ideal,” he admitted.

This is what figures to torque his East Side season ticket buyers.

There are other issues. Dickson learned this year in moving four basketball games to Spokane that the Cougs have to do more in the way of marketing than send out a guy with a sandwich board proclaiming, “Game tonight.” There may be 70,000 WSU alums up and down I-5, but how many get out of Dodge on Labor Day weekend? And how many of the disenfranchised East Siders will deign to spend their long weekend in Seattle, at considerable cost?

“That’s the biggest thing I have to weigh,” Dickson said. “Our support has grown the last three years and the big growth has been from Eastern Washington. How much to do we jeopardize that for the upside risk?

“But we’ve always taken the avenue of least resistance - putting the coaches and players on a plane and having them come back with a secure paycheck. I don’t think that’s the best way of helping them succeed. And I’m confident enough in the positive benefits of this - not just this game, but the approach - that I’m committed to it.”

And with good reason. But as we all know, reason doesn’t always register with a college football fan.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review