Cougs Plan To Get Real
Washington State will do everything short of flying in Colorado quarterback Koy Detmer to make today’s football scrimmage as game-like as possible, Cougars coach Mike Price promised Friday.
“I want to get these guys to feel nervous and a little stage fright,” Price said, envisioning the frenzied atmosphere of Folsom Field, where the Cougars meet the fifth-ranked Buffaloes in their Aug. 31 opener.
“Kevin McKenzie, Michael Black and Jonathan Nance and all these new guys who are contributing that haven’t been in there before, I want them to have some kind of game-like experience. Not just another day at work.
“We’re going to make it so game-like, with uniforms, music when we stretch, the P.A. announcer and the 30-second clock, the scoreboard.”
And the artificial turf. The Cougars’ first four games will be played on plastic, so Price has moved today’s scrimmage into Martin Stadium from the nearby natural-grass practice field.
That’s bad news for starting cornerback Shad Hinchen, who will be forced to watch from the sideline so the tendinitis in his knees isn’t aggravated.
“He just deserves better than this,” Price said. “The best thing to do is just stay off it, and he might have to stay off for four days.”
Dumas lends hand
Jay Dumas, who led WSU with 50 receptions last season, is helping receivers coach Mike Levenseller as a student assistant.
“Just finishing up school - got a few credits left and I’ll be done,” said Dumas, a communications major. “And hopefully, I’ll be a graduate assistant after that somewhere.”
Dumas is impressed by this year’s group of Cougars receivers, and believes they’ll be even more effective now that Ryan Leaf has earned the job at starting quarterback.
“This is probably the best group we’ve had depthwise since 1992, when we had C.J. Davis and those guys,” Dumas said. “I mean, we’ve got guys that can go deep, we’ve got great route-runners like Chad Carpenter, and we’ve got guys like Shawn Tims that have the speed.
“The ball is going to get there a lot quicker with Ryan, and now we have more of a deep threat. He can throw the ball 50, 60, 70 yards downfield sometimes. And you know, that might have been what held us back a little bit last year. We couldn’t really get the ball way downfield, and also we didn’t really have too much speed last year.”
Evans injured
Senior defensive lineman Da’vid Evans injured his left knee during Wednesday’s scrimmage and will have arthroscopic surgery to survey the damage, Price said. A torn meniscus is suspected. Evans offered an optimistic prognosis, saying he might return in five days.
, DataTimes