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John Blanchette

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All Stories

Sports

In his defense, Wulff has made progress

The record invites choler, but you know what really infuriates the football faction that demands Washington State file for divorce from Paul Wulff? He reminds them that they’re finally getting results commensurate with their level of support all these years.
Sports

Blanchette: CV graduate dares to deliver on dream

Surely you know someone who drolly insists, on a daily basis, that he’s “living the dream,” to the point where it seems clear the dream is to torture you with insincerity. And then there is Will Davis, who acknowledges the surreality of his dream/life although there is nothing faux about it.
Sports >  Gonzaga basketball

Blanchette: GU freshmen show how it’s done

It has not been a game for the faint of heart, this Wazzu-Zag U business, nor much for freshmen. Kevin Pangos pretty much changed that Monday night. In fact, he and Gary Bell Jr. have changed the entire equation at Gonzaga this season, even though it’s just two games old.
Sports

Same zone, different trigger man

It has not been a game for the faint of heart, this Wazzu-Zag U business, nor much for freshmen. Kevin Pangos pretty much changed that Monday night.
Sports

Blanchette: Sensational game makes QB talk of town

PULLMAN – Look, it isn’t as if Paul Wulff pulled a guy out of the stands at Martin Stadium in desperation and hustled him into a uniform to save the honor of ol’ State U. That’s so three years ago, back when Wulff was taking over the football program at Washington State and holding quarterback auditions for the student body.
Sports

Got plans for Halliday?

Connor Halliday, a redshirt freshman, came in and strafed the Pac-12’s No. 4 pass defense for 494 yards and four touchdowns in WSU's win over Arizona State late Saturday. And now he's the talk of the town.
Sports

Blanchette: Ex-Cougar Gleason embraces his biggest challenge

PULLMAN – An uncommon exhilaration coursed through the campus at Washington State the week before classes broke for Thanksgiving 1997. The Apple Cup approached and the Cougars were writing preposterous history that would culminate in their first Rose Bowl in 67 years. In the dark after Thursday’s practice, a sophomore linebacker from Spokane – an otherwise “very buttoned up” fellow named Steve Gleason – walked to his home near Greek Row, carried by the moment. “It was easy for me – no one knew who I was,” he recalled. “I was just walking up the hill, past the soccer field and the fraternities, and I was thinking, ‘Man, this is what everyone talks about.’ ”
Sports

Zags must rely on freshman guards

Freshman guards are not the third rail of college basketball. To hear tell, they might be even more lethal. It does not take much to inflate common wisdom into that sort of hyperbole, but this might be the easiest topic in which to do so. College hoops, we know from our lessons, is a guard’s game. They must be playmakers, yes, but reliable, low-risk, seen-it-all, steadying – descriptives that are applied to first-year guards about as often as Jay Bilas acknow- ledges that someone else might have a better idea.
Sports

Blanchette: We can hardly wait for sequels

Boise State to the Big East Conference. Really, that’s all we need to read to understand that when it comes to the shuffle of college football’s backstabbers and soul-sellers from conference to conference, it’s not a matter of getting our arms around it but of applying palm to forehead.
Sports

This tale has a familial feel to it

Among the hazards of being in the storytelling business is the inevitable feeling that you’re telling one that you’ve told before. But this time, it’s more than a feeling.
Sports

Gonzaga coach takes Halloween to scary limits

On a lawn in north Spokane, an in-the-ghouliday-spirit family has supplemented its bounty of fright night props with a 21st-century favorite – a chalk outline of a dead body, surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. What, is this Halloween or “Law & Order?”
Sports

One school’s team spirit is another’s broken trademark

It hasn’t been the football season at Eastern Washington University that most anticipated. The defending national champions lost their first four games, the lineup has been gashed by injuries and with just four games at Roos Field, well, Eags, we hardly knew ye. But on the eve of the home finale Saturday against Portland State, they’re inching back toward the Top 25 and still in the playoff hunt.
Sports

Olerud’s baseball career nothing short of amazing

To call John Olerud’s baseball life charmed is no first baseman’s stretch. Let’s see – two World Series rings, possibly the greatest college season in history, an American League batting title, membership in the exclusive straight-to-the-majors club and a shotgun seat on the Seattle Mariners’ magic-carpet-ride 116-victory season.
Sports

Blanchette: Cougars deserve boos that rained down

SEATTLE – Since they let the fans pick the uniforms online last week, maybe the next step for the Washington State Cougars is to let them call the plays from the stands. On the next-to-last snap before halftime here Saturday night, quarterback Jeff Tuel ducked and wiggled and shuffled to buy himself more time for a pass downfield, and what he bought himself was a long incompletion and a vicious lick from Oregon State linebacker Tony Wilson.
Sports

Leave Cougars at home

The arguments/positives/rationalizations for Washington State playing one of its Pacific-12 Conference home games on a neutral football field in Seattle have been given a more breathless airing than Demi’s weight loss, and they all ring pretty true. Well, except the one positing that Wazzu alums residing on the West Side deserve a game there.
Sports

Blanchette: Well, the score was very black-and-white

PULLMAN – Tough questions at Washington State on a Saturday night. For instance: Did the Cougars swoon that badly in the second half to divert criticism from the all-gray uniforms that won the day in an online vote of fans? Or did the gray-out somehow overwhelm the offensive plotting and performance, too?
Sports

Blanchette: Leaf isn’t trying to rewrite his unflattering history

Slumped in a lobby chair big enough to accommodate both Ryan Leafs – before and after – the current version was exploring the challenges of rehabilitating a good life and a good name. The old addictions, arrogance, demons, fears, mistakes, personal shortcomings – all are fair game in an exchange with the man who quarterbacked Washington State into the national football conversation 14 years ago before failure in the pros turned him into a national punch line. Like a Corleone, he keeps his friends close but those enemies to his better angels closer, having found that owning up is healthier than ignoring them.
Sports

Blanchette: But honey, Texas got in the way

You never know. But I do. • I don’t know about you, but the next time I’m in trouble for not balancing the checkbook or folding the laundry, I’m taking a cue from college athletics and blaming The Longhorn Network.
Sports

Friedrichs blends faith, hoops and education

Warren Friedrichs was one semester into the Lutheran seminary when the sound of a bouncing basketball started to drown out the lessons in liturgics and elementary Greek – and he wasn’t even on a team at the time. “I’m not sure my abilities were best fit for the ministry,” he said. “I have faith and it’s pretty strong, but for me to be the person they come to in crisis, I’m not sure I was equipped for that.”