John Blanchette

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Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

John Blanchette: Gonzaga dodges first speed bump of season, overcoming slow start in win over Utah State

UPDATED: Sat., Nov. 18, 2017

Mark Few is not a sandbagger in the Lou Holtz vein, where every Gonzaga opponent is the second coming of the Dream Team and land mines lurk beneath every dribble. But there’s a healthy respect for every opponent – in relative doses, of course – and a healthier respect for cautionary tales.

Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

John Blanchette: There is no shortage of memorable Gonzaga moments for John Stockton as he enters College Basketball Hall of Fame

UPDATED: Sat., Nov. 18, 2017

When John Stockton is solicited for some enduring moments of his college basketball days at Gonzaga, the memory train’s first stop is hardly a surprise.

Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

John Blanchette: Youth movement getting plenty of time in the spotlight for Gonzaga

UPDATED: Tue., Nov. 14, 2017

Ask the 5,000-odd people who made up the crowd they marked down again as 6,000 at McCarthey Athletic Center on Tuesday night what happened after Rui Hachimura’s latest Ruination of the laws of physics and they might not have an answer.

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: On Luke Falk’s homecoming, it was Washington State’s Hercules Mata’afa that did the home wrecking

Sat., Nov. 11, 2017

Perhaps when Sophie Mata'afa was naming the fifth of her seven children, she sold him a little short by settling on merely Hercules.

Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

John Blanchette: New-look Gonzaga showed they’re ready to step up in win over Texas Southern

Fri., Nov. 10, 2017

So how long will it take at Gonzaga to step away from the glow of the Bulldogs' Final Four season?

Sports

John Blanchette: Patrick Ferguson tightens belt, goes to work on bigger dreams

UPDATED: Tue., Nov. 7, 2017

In the dues-paying that attends any professional sports career, glamor is a no-show. Minor league bus rides. Scout teams and practice squads. Satellite tour golfers do get to play tournaments at country clubs, but often within earshot of grumbling members surrendering their tee times for a week.

Sports >  Seattle Seahawks

John Blanchette: Plenty of blame to share in Seahawks’ loss

UPDATED: Sun., Nov. 5, 2017

That loud bang you just heard was the window slamming on the Seattle Seahawks’ conceit of still being an elite team in the National Football League.

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: Cougs didn’t crack while leaving Stanford in rearview mirror

Sat., Nov. 4, 2017

Surely it’s taught in history classes at Washington State by now – that dark day back in 1970 when Stanford was rubbing the Cougs’ noses in it in Spokane and a good and loyal soldier named Terry Smith made the most resounding hit in school history.

Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

John Blanchette: Recruiting evolves but Gonzaga’s standards remain

Thu., Nov. 2, 2017

Once upon a time long, long ago in college basketball, there was a pretty uniform look to recruiting: junior college prospects to fill instant needs, freshmen for “program players.” There was also, with the enrollment of each recruiting class, a sense of plotting toward a grail.

Sports >  NCAA basketball

Pac-12 preview: Top two teams will have cloud over them this season

UPDATED: Thu., Nov. 2, 2017

The FBI turned college basketball upside down, and cast a big shadow over the 2018 Pac-12 season.

Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

WCC preview: There’s a reason Saint Mary’s is unanimous pick

UPDATED: Thu., Nov. 2, 2017

The West Coast Conference has already seen its Upset of the Year. It came in October when nine of the league’s head coaches made Saint Mary’s their pick to finish atop the regular-season standings.

Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

John Blanchette: Gonzaga’s Jerry Vermillion was serial entrepreneur, serial rebounder

Mon., Oct. 23, 2017

Jerry Vermillion, Gonzaga’s all-time rebounding leader – with an eye-popping record that won’t be broken – died over the weekend at age 85, another underappreciated pioneer gone. The program’s outsized accomplishments of the last two decades tend to lay waste to a history that’s modest, but meaningful.

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: Cougars’ win over Colorado shows new normal

UPDATED: Sun., Oct. 22, 2017

Normal is underrated. The proof was in the long week at Washington State that technically started a few hours early with the berserk unraveling in Berkeley – the by-now-almost-annual inexplicable face-plant that is as much a part of the Mike Leach era as his manufactured idylls on space life and boat-naming.

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: As Moos runs ‘wholeheartedly’ to Nebraska, who and what does he leave behind?

Sun., Oct. 15, 2017

In 1994, athletic director Jim Livengood departed for Arizona and Bill Moos – an assistant to three different Cougar ADs who’d detoured to Montana to apprentice at running his own store – thought he’d be the front-runner to replace him. He wasn’t even a finalist.

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: Mike Leach steals the show … after the game

Sat., Oct. 14, 2017

The most remarkable thing about Washington State’s not-ready-for-even-subprime-time play in getting beat 373-3, or something along those lines, on Friday night wasn’t the 17 turnovers or the 29 sacks or the 12 Cal students who stuck around to, uh, storm the field. It was the muted reaction.

Sports >  Spokane Chiefs

John Blanchette: Mature attitude helps Spokane’s Kailer Yamamoto earn spot on Oilers roster

Tue., Oct. 3, 2017

A perverse obsession with the next thing became sport’s designer drug some time ago, lapping the passé high of getting off on something as mundane as today’s game.

Sports >  Seattle Seahawks

John Blanchette: Three guys happy to play and some Wilson anger fuel victory

Sun., Oct. 1, 2017

So this is what it’s come to for the Seattle Seahawks? Justin Coleman and J.D. McKissic and Marcus Smith?

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: Cougars shed underdog label that they didn’t deserve anyway

UPDATED: Sat., Sept. 30, 2017

One play, decided nothing, revealed everything.

Sports >  Spokane Chiefs

John Blanchette: Spokane Chiefs roster work in progress but offers possibility

Thu., Sept. 28, 2017

Dead last, no playoffs, coaching change, new regime. So when do the Spokane Chiefs hoist that next Western Hockey League championship banner to the top of the Spokane Arena? Why not next year?

Sports

Jud Heathcote remembered dearly by many of those who loved him

Sat., Sept. 23, 2017

Four distinct generations of players from each of his coaching stops, coaching protégés from near and far and a slew of his Spokane friends did their best to capture the life of Jud Heathcote on Saturday afternoon – their stories as funny, generous and true as the man himself.

Sports >  Seattle Seahawks

John Blanchette: Seahawks try to put lipstick on this pigskin problem

Sun., Sept. 17, 2017

Let’s start with the concept of the touchdown, foreign as it is to the Seattle Seahawks.

Sports >  Seattle Seahawks

Seahawks edge San Francisco 49ers for first win of season

UPDATED: Sun., Sept. 17, 2017

Faced with the prospect of starting the season 0-2, Seattle drove for the go-ahead touchdown on Russell Wilson’s 9-yard pass to Paul Richardson and held on to defeat the San Francisco 49ers 12-9 on Sunday at Century Link Field.

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: Cougars’ giddiness over 3-0 start tempered by injury to Oregon State’s Jake Luton

UPDATED: Sat., Sept. 16, 2017

The first pass covered a cool 14 yards, but then there was a bubble screen that went nowhere, a sack – by a team that had sacked nobody all season – and finally a medium-deep ball swatted away at the last minute. This was Washington State’s start on Saturday afternoon, worse even than the Cougars’ start last Saturday. Which tells you a lot about how much gravitas to attach to “starts.”

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: Something special, zany filled the air in Pullman

UPDATED: Sun., Sept. 10, 2017

Having worked overtime all week, the gray haze smothering the region took Saturday off, for the most part – the air on the Palouse no worse than if it was just combines kicking up dust in the distance near Albion.

Sports >  WSU football

John Blanchette: Brett Rypien faces Washington State with something to prove

UPDATED: Tue., Sept. 5, 2017

The five stages of grief have nothing on the college football fan’s emotional dance with the starting quarterback. Often as not, those reactions – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – become a freeway pileup, cleaned up and towed away by halftime.