Cougars Make Better Showing This Time Out

If you win the Rose Bowl for the first time in three generations, maybe it doesn’t matter if you don’t win much of anything else.

Let’s face it: Pawthentics profits didn’t plummet at Washington State University just because the golf team was 45 over par at the Pacific-10 championships.

OK, maybe sales of head covers dipped a bit.

But there is something to be said for the grand gesture - in this case, the Granddaddy gesture of them all - being of greater value than balance, generalism or achievement across the board.

Don’t think so?

Well, ask the Utah Jazz if they’d trade a couple of those routine 50-win seasons for a championship rally this morning in Temple Square.

Nine months ago, we toted up the wins and losses at Wazzu and discovered that the 1996-97 school year had been the Cougars’ worst competitively since 1990. It wasn’t a bulletin. After four postseason trips in five years, men’s basketball went into free fall. Baseball had the worst season in school history. Women’s hoops continued to stretch the boundaries of mediocrity. And for the first time in 36 years, the four major men’s teams failed to beat rival Washington even once.

Confronted with these unhappy endings, it was a little odd to hear athletic director Rick Dickson contend, on the first day of September, that the Cougars were “looking at a year when we’re positioned to succeed on the competitive front.”

Then the football team beat UCLA and the rest of the athletic program went on to prove Dickson at least partially right.

In 1997-98, the Cougars raised their athletic “batting average” - their finish in all Pac-10 sports, with 1.000 being the equivalent of a championship in each - from .286 to .333, their best showing of the 1990s. Throw in WSU’s showing in the Mountain Pacific indoor track championships - which involves eight Pac-10 teams with varying degrees of commitment - and that average climbs to .381.

And in the just-tabulated Sears Directors Cup standings - an all-sports gauge pegged to how teams fare nationally - WSU jumped from 124th to a tie for 66th.

That doesn’t mean we’re ushering in the golden era of Cougar athletics, but perhaps there is some fight in the cat yet.

Of course, without football’s dizzying success, Wazzu’s batting average would have been even lower than the year before.

But then, getting to the Rose Bowl was the one grail many a good Coug had given up on. You could advance the theory that if the Cougs can manage that, they can manage anything.

And, in truth, there were successes on fronts other than football.

Baseball poked its cap above the .500 mark for the first time in four years, though the bottom line didn’t change - the Cougs were still third in the Pac-10 North.

In addition to winning indoors (the women placing second), men’s track moved back into the Pac-10’s first division - and into the top 15 nationally after placing 40th the year before.

The volleyball team reached the NCAAs for the sixth time this decade. The swim team actually sent one of its own - Erin Eldridge - to nationals for the first time.

And the scorecard against the Huskies in the four traditional men’s sports: 6-6. Alas, in what would be considered the big four women’s sports, the Cougs were 1-5.

Some of these notations are so modest that they would be hooted at elsewhere - and, indeed, those Sears Cup standings show that seven Pac-10 teams wound up in the top 10. But then, making the top 20 in water polo will earn you points, even if nobody east of Barstow knows the rules.

And, of course, what neither of these yardsticks measure is how far the Cougars must stretch a dollar compared with its rivals. Even with a $5.5 million increase in the athletic budget over the past three years, the Cougs spend less than anyone in the conference - their revenues less than half of what the Washington Cashcows rake in.

“Too many times,” Dickson has said, “we were doing more with less, and that only goes so far.”

For the next couple of years, they’ll have to do it out of old dorm rooms while Bohler Gym gets its final makeover. The $16 million addition - the barbell castle - is up and running and probably responsible for a recruiting victory or two already. Dickson is eyeing some upgrades for Hollingbery Fieldhouse that would make it something other than an inefficient antique.

It isn’t all about money. Basketball must find a way to recruit better athletes the way football has, because the staff hasn’t been able to figure out how to make the marginal ones good enough the way football has. Likewise, the financial commitment the Cougs have made to women’s athletics needs to be matched with an emotional one; the he’s-a-good-guy logic that resulted in the retention of the women’s basketball coach was dubious, at best.

In time - not soon, but in time - the bloom will be off the Rose. And then it will matter very much.

You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.