This Was A Dear Victory
For a morality play to come factoryloaded with a happy ending usually means Disney’s animators have been busy at their craft.
You know. Bambi’s parents died, but he still wound up as king of the forest?
Well, Bambi Neuheisel is king.
Maybe for just a day, maybe just for a week, maybe until some dogged Colorado journalist somehow implicates him - monster that he is - in that Jon Benet business. Something is bound to occur that will again cause the college football world to smell the manifest evil behind Rick Neuheisel’s well-scrubbed Skippiness, but for now the glare from the University of Washington’s 31-24 victory on Saturday is just too great.
As events have unfolded this fall, only one game on the Huskies’ schedule absolutely had to be won, and that was Saturday’s splendid docudrama against the Colorado Buffaloes.
The Apple Cup? Get serious. Are they still going to play it?
The Pac-10 season? Win that and what have you got - the spiffiest Underwood manual at Microsoft?
All you needed to know about the grandeur of this game was that at a charity auction last summer, Neuheisel offered bidders access to the pre-game pep talk, the run through the tunnel with the team and the Husky sideline - and the package sold for $30,000. The confluence of so much fact and fiction at Husky Stadium was simply irresistible.
And one of the facts everyone seemed to forget is that the Huskies were a part of this shindig, too.
Winless, hungry and low on self-esteem, sure, but definitely a part.
“I told them the media has gotten this thing to look like a Burger King commercial - 11 guys coming to blow me up,” Neuheisel said.
“None of them got asked for an interview this week. Not one media request for a player from the University of Washington, in a game of this magnitude. It was all about the coach - and as I told them, `I ain’t playing. This is about you.’ ”
Yes, their coach this year had coached the other team the previous four. Yes, he had left Colorado abruptly and awkwardly for a mountain of money. Yes, when his critics and his successor spit at him, he had spit back. Yes, he was the most reviled man in the Rockies.
But the Huskies were 0-2, and hadn’t been 0-3 in 30 years. Their psyches were wounded, having been written off as defensively inept and borderline suicidal.
They had delusions of adequacy. And motivation.
“It wasn’t an ordinary game for him,” said receiver Chris Juergens, who caught the winning pass by outdueling CU’s Ben Kelly, who had run back both a kickoff and a fumble for touchdowns, “and it wasn’t ordinary for us, but for different reasons. Something like that (being ignored by the media) might make you a little upset, but we were already fired up enough.”
And you wonder if Colorado’s motivation may have been one-dimensional.
“Maybe in this game,” said Buffs linebacker Ty Gregorak of Spokane, “our emotion was a little too high.”
Barely ordinary on offense their first two games, the Huskies punted three times before managing the most excruciating 44-yard scoring drive in football history - 7 minutes, 17 seconds worth of 2-yard gains. With yardage that hard to come by, it didn’t look good for the Dawgs when their 7-0 lead was immediately erased by Kelly’s 98-yard kickoff return.
But in the second half, the Huskies solved the riddle. Aside from two possessions short-circuited by quick turnovers, they scored every time they had the ball until the take-a-knee final moments.
They smoothed out the wrinkles in their option plays and blew the Buffs off the ball. Tailback Willie Hurst, left for dead a week ago, resurrected himself with slashing runs. Juergens, Todd Elstrom and Dane Looker made monster catches. Tackle Elliot Silvers fell on a fumble the Huskies simply couldn’t afford to lose. And on the sidelines, the Huskies staff came up with the call that made all the difference - quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo faking an option keeper, then lofting a pretty rainbow to Gerald Harris for a momentum-swinging touchdown.
In the meantime, the UW defense held Colorado - which was leading the nation with an average of 84 offensive plays a game - to just 289 yards. It didn’t help the Buffs to have seven dropped passes, leading to speculation that Washington State had loaned them Nian Taylor to be receivers coach for a week.
And when it went from 14-7 UW to 21-14 Colorado in the space of 2 minutes midway through the third quarter, the Huskies didn’t hide.
Could it be - gadzooks - that Slick Rick actually outcoached his successor, Gary Barnett? Oh, right - Barnett is stuck with Rick’s old players.
Maybe Gary should try a sweater vest.
“It was a joy to watch (our) players,” said Neuheisel, “who were kind of obscured through all this respond to a challenge - and just wouldn’t give up even though it got a little dicey.”
It was also a joy to watch Neuheisel work a crowd of his former players after the final gun, administering the hugs and best wishes he for some reason couldn’t bring himself to do when he left Colorado.
“You can’t let the press,” he told Gregorak in a clinch, “get between you and me.”
The embraces he got in return were just as genuine.
“It was nice to hear they still cared about me, frankly,” he said.
“I didn’t know what to expect and that was what I was bracing myself for. I didn’t know how it would shake out. I didn’t know if there would be bitterness, but I made up my mind I’d be able to handle it whatever it was.”
He has spent a lot of time convincing himself of just that, knowing even as he swallowed Barbara Hedges’ bait that this game was on the schedule. He steeled himself for all the barbs - that as a coach, he couldn’t slide his belt through all the loops and that he was a master of perception in a business where they actually keep score.
Yeah, he was 13-12 in his last 25 games as a head coach - hardly a million-dollar record. Yeah, he left behind a bad taste with a good many folks in Colorado. And, yeah, his new team had flopped in its first two games.
“But you can’t get so caught up in fixing something that’s behind you,” Neuheisel said. “You keep going forward. You can always birdie the next hole.”