Fans willing to march to Seattle

SEATTLE – Cougar football wouldn’t be Cougar football with out its vocal fan factions. Current favorites include the Swogger-should-start splinter group, Doba’s play-calling helpers and the never-quit hard-liquor- in-the-fieldhouse lobby.

There are even a few holdouts – presumably from Pullman, Spokane and other scablands outposts – who continue to regard Washington State’s annual “home” game at Qwest Field as silly, wrong-headed and fiscal folly, if not downright sacrilege.

Let this be their cue to surrender.

There will be a Seattle game, and it will be played every year.

Because if the concept can survive this year’s nonsense, it has the constitution of a cockroach and the legs of Cameron Diaz.

Is this grumbling about Grambling? Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Also about the Cougs, the rest of the September schedule and the recklessness of Jerome Harrison still packing the mail with a five-touchdown lead in the fourth quarter of a nothing game and his 100-yard streak already intact.

Further grievances as they become available.

This is not to say the Cougars themselves couldn’t find a good spin to put on their 48-7 dissection of Grambling State – or that they’re not entitled to take the rosiest view. They will – bottom line – exit September 3-0, and why feel bad about that? Two of Wazzu’s 10-win teams of recent vintage couldn’t say the same.

Of course, those two teams actually, you know, played somebody.

But here’s the deal: There is entertainment and then there is entertainment value, and the football game Saturday may have had the former. Maybe. It’s always fun to watch Jason Hill catch a touchdown pass, but there’s not much value in watching him do it against a defensive back who was passed over by 119 Division I-A teams.

How else to put this? Remember the old made-for-TV movie that starred decathlon gold medalist Bruce Jenner as the first white player in Grambling’s football history? No? You don’t remember?

Well, exactly. This was that.

Of course, it was conceded long before kickoff that the only real entertainment would be committed by Grambling’s world-class marching band in its showcase after the game – but we certainly had no idea just how prescient that presumption was. For after they’d gone through their rehearsed paces, the Marching Tigers graciously dragged the always-available-for-fun Cougar Marching Band down on the field and put them through a crash course in Funk 101.

(Graciously, because just moments earlier the WSU band members struck up the fight song and thoughtlessly blared over the end of Grambling’s alma mater – even as Wazzu coach Bill Doba tried to signal them to put down their horns.)

Anyway, as the two drumlines pounded away, the Coug banditos did their best to mimic the slides and thrusts and lunges and airplanes and dogs-at-the- hydrant – and a few other moves that you usually see only on Cinemax. In watching the willing novices, one thing was made perfectly clear:

There is too a place for the rhythm impaired in the music industry.

It was not remarkable to see how many of the announced audience of 51,486 stuck around for the fifth-quarter show – not nearly as remarkable as the number itself.

From a ticket count that looked like a borderline disaster two weeks ago, Wazzu was able to rally twice as many folks to the gate as hated rival Washington was able to lure to Qwest just two weeks ago when it met Air Force off campus. This despite the fact, of course, that WSU’s student body is quartered 300 miles away. Indeed, the final total at Qwest on Saturday was within 10,000 of what the Huskies drew against Idaho across town earlier in the afternoon.

“Six months ago, I said we should get 50,000,” WSU athletic director Jim Sterk recalled, “and our marketing folks looked at me like I was a little crazy. I felt that Grambling and the attraction (of the band) would add a little pizazz to it, and that the last few weeks people would jump on it.”

And, as such, rescue the Cougs from some financial risk.

Washington State gave the Tigers a $500,000 guarantee to make this trip – stunningly high for a Division I-AA body-bagger, but then not every I-AA school can bring this band or the profile Grambling has with its long list of NFL alums and the legend of former coach Eddie Robinson. Sterk noted as much when he said, “There is no way I would have brought a I-AA team here without that type of reputation.”

He also said, “I would not have brought them without First-and-Goal’s help” – meaning the Qwest/Seahawks production arm which helped bankroll the guarantee.

That will allow the Cougs to turn a profit, though Sterk couldn’t guess how much. Surely the take has gone down from the initial venture four years ago.

“But the risk was low when we brought our very first game here,” Sterk said. “They (First-and-Goal) wanted to work with us so our exposure wasn’t as high. If we were successful, they became more successful, too.”

There were many in the Cougar constituency, however, who expected better opposition for this big-city exposure than Nevada, Idaho and Grambling State. Something more along the lines of Colorado, who beat the Cougs here a year ago – and which the humbugs continue to insist would have been a win had WSU been playing in its real home.

Maybe so.

But unlike the 500 grand, that was never a guarantee, any more than Doba guarantees a flawless performance any time

There is really no point in going overboard with either the attaboys or the nitpicks. For every Cougar who called this another confidence builder, there was a welcome note of realism.

“We were better than they were,” Doba said. “I’m not unhappy with the win, but we have to play better than that in the Pac-10 to survive.”

That’s the downside of this entire September enterprise: the Cougs may learn more about themselves during the upcoming bye week than they did in their first three games.

So this needs to be the coda for the Gramblings and – what do you know? – it is. Next year it’ll be Baylor for the Cougs at Qwest, and San Diego State the year after. Then it’s Utah and, in all likelihood, Ohio State in 2009.

But if the Seattle project has shown Sterk anything, it’s that there can be satisfaction in shooting fish in a barrel.

“I feel we have a base of 40,000 who are going to come to this game no matter who we schedule,” he said. “If we don’t screw it up.”

Well, there will always be a faction to tell him if he does.