If Eastman Must Go, Would Anyone Know?

The troubling part is not the 9-18 record, necessarily.

The troubling part isn’t the utter futility of another courageous effort left unrequited, the upset left unfinished, the copyrighted trademark of the play not made - or the foul not called if you want to commiserate with coach Kevin Eastman. Which, on that point, we don’t.

The troubling part isn’t that Washington State was left with no options - none - other than having Mr. B Tournament gamely shadowing one of UCLA’s McDonald’s All-Underachievers for the final 6 minutes, though not nearly close enough the final 6 seconds.

No, this is the troubling part regarding the Bruins’ latest great escape at Friel Court, Thursday night’s 78-75 victory over the Cougars:

Some of the ticket sellers weren’t aware there was a game.

Not due to any particular confusion, but simply because no potential customers had come by to remind them. A trip to a primary ticket outlet in Spokane about noon Thursday to purchase a reserved seat resulted in a blank look from the ticketeer and a confession that she hadn’t had cause to punch in the computer code for this particular game, because she had fielded no ticket requests to that point.

Gallagher, yes. UCLA, no.

This is the same UCLA - well, maybe not the same UCLA, but you get the drift - which has put 11,000 fannies or more into Friel on seven previous occasions. Thursday’s generous mensuration was 4,816, though that may have been a leg count and not a body count.

Once upon a time, Cougar coaches and their bosses complained that local fans turned out to see the “name” opponents and not the home team.

Now even that point is moot.

“If anything worries me, it’s probably the apathy about the program,” admitted WSU athletic director Rick Dickson. “Tonight was probably if not the best night of the season, then close to it and it was a long way from being where you want it.”

He was talking about attendance, but he may as well have been talking about atmosphere, results, talent. What he’s not talking about is a change. The change.

“Right now,” he said, “I don’t feel a personnel change is the solution.”

This will be bad news to the students who showed up with the “Fire Eastman” placard and displayed it oh-so-courageously for maybe 1/100th of a second as the Cougars took the floor. It’s bad news for the disgruntled season-ticket holder who took the occasion of this defeat to encourage us to start stacking kindling for the bonfire, though he has not put his own name to any recall petition as yet.

The timing seemed the teensiest bit curious since the Cougs had just taken the nation’s 18th-ranked team down to the final :00.3 before Kris Johnson drained his 25-footer over the visage of good Will Hutchens.

But then, every game for the past couple of months has become a referendum on the Kevin Eastman administration.

Or so we presumed.

Actually, it’s never been much of an issue with the one guy who counts - Dickson - nor apparently with his correspondents.

“I can’t say I’ve gotten a single piece of negative mail,” said Dickson, knowing full well saying so could change that. “Not that there’s been much volume - of maybe 10 to a dozen things in there, I’ve not had one negative one.”

Apathy, again, could be a reason.

Or perhaps reason is a reason.

“I think people who know the situation understand, and that could depend on how close they are to the situation,” he said. ‘You know, there’s not a lot of highlights to talk about. Some not-positive things have happened to the program, no question.”

Mostly in the realm of talent retention. If you’ve been keeping up with the course work, you’ll know that since midsummer the Cougs have lost the likes of Beau Archibald, Ron Selleaze and Rodrigo de la Fuente through circumstances bizarre and luckless. Any one of them might have been the difference Thursday night; together, well, who knows? The tournament selection committee needn’t have waited up, but surely Wazzu would have been a few more games to the good.

“It’s real simple,” Eastman said after this latest disappointment. “Why do UCLA and Arizona win? Because they’ve got better players, plain and simple. But the players get it done. Arizona’s players get it done and our guys get it done in terms of effort and energy, the enthusiasm, togetherness, camaraderie.

“I venture to say many coaches around the country that are going through some losing right now would love to have our team.”

Yikes. Has it come to that? Leanest envy?

Yes, Eastman has milked the most out of what remained, but that guy in the L’il Abner strip milked a lot out of that black cloud, too.

And now the question seems to be whether that cloud will go away.

For the record, Eastman has two more years remaining on his contract. Dickson extended the original five-year deal by a year after Eastman’s first or second season - he couldn’t remember which.

“I don’t know who to fault,” said Dickson. “If there’s anything that (Eastman) could have done specifically to prevent those, then maybe you start presenting those type of problems to him. And I can’t.

“At some point, we’re all held accountable and Kevin knows that. But I also know that Mike Price went 3-8 and 5-6 and we didn’t give up on him, either.”

Nope. But the ticket outlets knew when there was a football game, even in those days.

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