Without Better Product, WSU Seems Doomed

About the time USC’s Jeff Trepagnier took the elevator to the top of the square on the backboard glass and corraled an alley-oop pass for a reverse dunk Thursday night, it all snapped into focus.

Oh, yeah. The only thing holding back Washington State athletics is bad marketing.

This is the hard-core Wazzu fan’s common lament - that there would be more bodies behind him if only the house hucksters would produce cuter TV spots, put on a more dazzling pregame function and personally ferry the soft-core Cougs from their La-Z-Boys to one of the many good seats which are perpetually available.

In his reasoning, it matters not if the product on the court or the field is as hapless as the Cougars have been for two years now in almost everything. Nor that championships at Wazzu are as rare as Dick Vitale toning it down to a stage whisper.

Marketing will fix it. Marketing will make them come.

Basically, he’s suggesting that we can be sold anything.

Well, that’s a description which flatters what the Cougars were able to run out there for their Pacific-10 Conference opener at the Spokane Arena. Ravaged by injury, illness and defection, coach Paul Graham’s Cougars had a distinctly NAIA look - several levels below even their usual scrappy underdog persona - in an 83-61 loss to the Trojans, who themselves aspire merely to finish in the middle of the Pac, despite Trepagnier and his trapeze.

This kind of unhypeable show is not easy to sell to Spokane’s sporting consumers, so the announcement of a crowd of 4,430 was a surprise. It was even more of a surprise if you were there trying to reconcile the count with the empty seats. Brings to mind the old cheating husband’s line: You going to believe me, or your lying eyes?

One thing’s for certain: However many showed up Thursday night, they would not have filled Gonzaga’s closet-ish Kennel - which, as it happens, will be fanny-to-fanny Saturday night for the Zags’ next-to-meaningless game against something called Texas-Pan American, which sounds a little like a Dash-8 airline flying between Galveston and Amarillo.

Not only will The Kennel be filled, but a few unhappy souls will be turned away. But at least folks will have the opportunity to buy a ticket Saturday; there doesn’t figure to be a public sale for any more GU home games.

Wow, they must be marketing the hell out of it over on the North Bank, no?

“I’d love to say that it’s a great job of marketing and promotions,” said Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth. “But we haven’t done any of that.

“We haven’t done any advertising. We didn’t do any sort of promotion to get people to buy a ticket this year.”

They didn’t need to, obviously. The city is still giddy from the dramatic, unprecedented, magical ride the Bulldogs pulled off 10 months ago - a run which managed to outstrip the steady, entertaining, admirable kind of winning they’d been doing for more than a decade.

People like GU’s style, they like the players, they like the atmosphere. But take that all away, and they’d still like the winning.

They like it every place.

“Love it or hate it,” said Jack Lucas of G&B SelectA-Seat, who has the rugged job of peddling tickets to Arena basketball games, “people base their participation on whether they’re winning or losing, what type of team they have.”

Alas, they have become all-too used to the type of team the Cougars have. And since Wazzu is struggling to fill seats in Pullman even when school is in session, it’s not a shock to see the gate down in Spokane.

Still, in 10 previous Arena games, the Cougars averaged 5,602 - 6,952 if you whittle it down to the five January Pac-10 games they’ve played here. Just four years ago, the Cougs sold out the Arena to the tune of 11,897 for UCLA.

So people have come out. They just aren’t inclined to come out for a product like this.

This is no particular revelation - that winning sells - but marketing has become such a numbing buzzword that we’ve come to assume sticking a logo on soy will turn it into steak.

And, yes, sometimes it does. If you check attendance figures from Brett Sports enterprises at the baseball park and the hockey rink, you’ll notice that the won-lost record doesn’t have the drastic impact on the turnstile count that you might imagine.

“Hockey has 36 games to create a relationship,” Lucas reasoned. “You can really hammer group sales and special promotions. But when you have a lone game sitting out there, it’s tough. We get some sponsorships, but we don’t have $25,000 to spend on ads. We have $8,000-$10,000 and you have to stretch that as far as you can. This time of year, if you start advertising too early, in mid-December, you lose everybody before the game ever gets here.”

It could help, possibly, if the Cougars could ever put together a mid-December game in the Arena against a quality national-name opponent - yet unless it’s a Top 10-type team, it’s unlikely a name alone will chase people through the doors. Still, Lucas said the school and G&B are working on it.

“We don’t want to lose college basketball,” Lucas said. “We’re willing to take the financial risk to keep it in the Arena.”

But the special-event feel it will need to succeed here will never materialize until the Cougs themselves are something special. This, of course, is Graham’s grail - and though he’s playing poker with a blackjack hand at the moment, the Cougars fans who did show up had reason to be disappointed. USC could have pretty much named the score, had the Trojans the necessary attention span to keep the pedal to the floor.

“I think we’re a better club than we exhibited tonight,” Graham groused.

As marketing slogans go, it’s not a keeper. But it’s a start.