Cougars Realize Recruiting Losses Don’t Hurt Record

So if Ohio State doesn’t win the national championship in 1999, John Cooper is toast, right?

Gotta be. Three “services” - by which we mean “drones” - that track college football recruiting say the Buckeyes smoked the field on national letter-of-intent day. Armed with the best talent, all a coach can do now is either win it all or screw it up.

Ergo, either Ohio State is No. 1 in four years or Coop takes a swim in No. 2.

No? You mean they’ll still have to go ahead and play games to determine the winners?

That’s good news for Washington State, which for approximately the 100th consecutive year underwhelmed the self-appointed gurus of Recruiterville. Coach Mike Price and his staff reeled in a catch conspicuously short on Supers, Alls and Best-ofs.

On the upside, none of the services suggested Wazzu drop the sport.

The madness of letting the morning horoscope dictate your day is obviously lost on the insiders scoping out college football. Mike Price has never, in our memory, had a recruiting class rank among anyone’s top 25.

He has, however, had two football teams finish in the Top 25.

Besides, what the Cougars rounded up was not so much a recruiting class as it was a salad.

Fourteen high school seniors. Five junior-college transfers. A senior transfer from a discontinued program. A mid-year freshman enrollee. Four Prop 48 survivors. Go ahead and toss in four 1995 transfers who sat out last season. And there’s more on the way.

Seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen. It’s not a class you’ll be able to track through four years - not by design, necessarily, though Price did feel some sense of urgency.

Six straight losses to finish a season will do that.

“I felt like we were just running on gas fumes when we played the Apple Cup,” Price said. “The tank was empty, or maybe a quarter full, and I like it to be three-quarters full at the end. What we’re hoping this class can do is develop so that by the sixth or seventh game - where the Cougars have faltered late whether because of injuries or the schedule or whatever - they can carry us through. We’ll have some depth now with older athletes.

“Whether the lineup changes the first game, I don’t know, but by the end of the year, some of these guys will step up and play quite a bit.”

Some are needed sooner than that. JC import Michael Black - a 2,400-yard man from West Los Angeles - and San Diego State transfer James Curtis are the latest candidates to be that home-run back Price’s offense so desperately needs. The Cougs could use a go-to receiver, too, and maybe slotback Kevin McKenzie is the answer. Malcolm Stewart and Eboni Wilson lead yet another wave of young talent that needs to restore the teeth to WSU’s defensive line.

And yet the one recruit Price seems to want to talk about is Lewis and Clark quarterback Paul Mencke - maybe because the coach senses the skepticism over the signing of a player who wasn’t either first- or second-team All-GSL.

“We went into three states recruiting other quarterbacks,” Price reported, “and the question is always, ‘How soon can I play?’ Well, with Ryan Leaf being just a sophomore and Steve Birnbaum a freshman, (kids) are going to wonder. With Paul, he’s only played quarterback a year and he knows he needs to redshirt and learn.

“Maybe we could have taken another quarterback who’s better now - but in two years he might not be. Paul’s a great athlete and he’s got a live arm. He goes to Eastern or Idaho and maybe you’re looking at another John Friesz.”

Who, obviously, could have taken a few snaps as a Coug.

As it happens, Mencke was one of just seven Washington recruits Price signed. Across the state, Washington coach Jim Lambright landed eight - nine if you count Corey Dillon, a Seattle tailback who did JC tours in Kansas and Utah.

There was a bit of a talent drain in-state this winter. Adam Bledsoe, the one high-profile quarterback WSU really had a shot at, chose Colorado. Much-coveted lineman Travis Claridge picked USC. Linebacker Mac Morrison of South Kitsap fell in love with Penn State.

“If there’s anything that disappointed me, it was that - the number of kids who went out of state,” Price said. “Maybe that was a good eye opener for myself and for Coach Lambright. We lost six this year to out-of-state schools - and WSU probably wasn’t the second choice. That’s something we’ve got to change.

“The last thing we need is for USC to be taking guys away up here. Aren’t there enough All-Americans down where they are?”

The recruiting services think so. Now if they could only promise the Trojans a batch that could beat Notre Dame or UCLA.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review