John Blanchette

So after 10 months of academia-grade navel gazing, a $75,000 fee to a headhunter, untold faculty/administrative search committee hours on the clock, the expense of personally interviewing more than a dozen candidates and, of course, a $500,000 payoff to not come to work made to the previous athletic director he’d hired, University of Washington president Mark Emmert made his move Wednesday. He hired the guy already filling the AD’s job on an interim basis.

Here the Spokane Chiefs have barely had time to get the trophy repaired and already they’re being summoned to begin work on winning another one. The Western Hockey League’s 2008-09 season starts for the Chiefs on Thursday evening in Cranbrook, British Columbia, a mere 116 days after they returned bleary-eyed from Kitchener, Ontario, with a Memorial Cup that had come apart in their hands, much as the competition had. So quick has been the turnaround that the players may still be scratching out of reflex where their playoff beards once grew.

What was once a college football game is now also a race against Mother Nature. Washington State and Baylor have pushed their game from Saturday morning to tonight, in the hopes of avoiding the brunt of Hurricane Ike when it makes landfall on the Texas coast and moves inland.

Let’s just get it over with. Strip these referees of their stripes and get them fitted for tunics silk-screened with bull’s-eyes. Or failing that, jumpsuits in county lockup orange.

PULLMAN – Statistical hair-splitting may support a different conclusion, but the scoreboard declared that the lousiest game of football played by Washington State occurred at spiffed-up Martin Stadium on Saturday afternoon. You know, the joint made more fan-friendly by Phases I and II of a grand and earnest renovation plan?

PULLMAN – Is the quarterback controversy at Washington State University that the Cougars don’t have a capable one? That at least has to be in the discussion after three Cougar quarterbacks shared in four interceptions and managed just 110 yards through the air in the 66-3 beating at the hands of California at Martin Stadium on Saturday.

Last Saturday afternoon, Tim Hulett paced his hotel room, trying to will his imagination through the radio and into the eyes, hands and synapses of his oldest son. Tug Hulett, in the lineup for the Seattle Mariners against Cleveland that day, was going to hit his first major league home run. His dad just knew it.

SEATTLE – If there was one area in which the Washington State Cougars performed poorly the final few years of Bill Doba’s coaching tenure, it was in special teams. Two years ago the Cougars finished last in three kickoff categories and in the bottom half of every other special-team statistic the Pac-10 keeps.

Came the news Thursday that Washington State is down to something in the neighborhood of 73 football players on scholarship, a dozen less than the maximum allowed – attrition that is only one reason the Cougars are a popular pick to finish last in the Pacific-10 Conference. On the other hand, if new coach Paul Wulff can shed about 10 more, the Cougs could be eligible to contend for the national title in the Football Championship Subdivision.

The father tells people – and he has told enough that the son has given up rolling his eyes in exasperation – that this all began just out of the crib. No pole, no landing pit, no Olympic flame giving off so much as a flicker to capture Brad Walker’s athletic imagination. “I started him jumping off his changer into my arms and yelling, ‘Superman!’ ” Tom Walker recalled. “Then he started going off the dresser and anywhere else he could get some height, and we’d have to be ready for, ‘Here’s Superman!’ ”

When he’s running through the streets of his hometown of Pasadena, it’s not entirely clear whether it’s the music in his head moving Nolan Shaheed along or the movement that’s bringing out the music. He only knows this: About two miles into a 12-miler, a musical thought blossoms. Somewhere between four and six miles, the notes begin arranging themselves.

Like all the athletes bound for Spokane and the track meet for the ages – or is that aged? – this week, Gene Lorenzen inquired about the weather. No surprise. When you’ll have 70- and 80-year-olds circling the track at Spokane Falls Community College upward of 25 times, the thermometer is likely to be of as much importance as the stopwatch. And yet Lorenzen was not displeased that the forecast calls for hot.

PULLMAN – The first game can’t come soon enough and it comes too soon. Football at Washington State University reconvened Tuesday under both a hot sun and the scattered clouds left over from four bowl-less seasons, the repossession of eight scholarships by the NCAA transcript cops and a mountain of misdemeanors going back two years.

Hard to know what was louder – the inevitable din of the Cheerstix handed out by the Spokane Shock on Saturday, or all the teeth-gnashing during the week over sluggish ticket sales lest those noisemakers go to waste. A close third: Shock defensive back Roshawn Marshall’s constant conversation with opposing receivers.

Matt Brown has been a regular commuter on baseball’s Triple-A shuttle the last two summers – four times bouncing between the Los Angeles Angels and their farm club in Salt Lake City. But his brief stays in the big leagues to this point likely won’t compare to the call-up he received this month.

PULLMAN – The perks of being an Olympian aren’t lost on Diana Pickler. For instance, her shoe sponsor, Asics, is stitching her a special pair of spikes for Beijing, personalized with her name. On the night she made the team, she walked into a Eugene, Ore., pizza house with her family and received a standing ovation from the diners. Accessories and acclaim are fine, but the true bonus is realized mostly in her head, when she’s grinding out repeat 200-meter sprints on a lonesome track in the heat of a Pullman summer.