John Blanchette sees a silver lining to Swogger’s dark cloud that was last season

He is 6-foot-5 and 247 pounds – Sunday’s weight – and yet Josh Swogger has felt, more than just occasionally these past 10 months, as if he’s been hiding in plain sight.

Even among his teammates.

But not Sunday morning. The Washington State Cougars convened for fall football camp before the thermometer became a truly hostile witness, and though it was no-contact tasks in shorts, it was enough to make Swogger feel as if he’d been rescued from the lost-and-found box with the odd mitten and pocket comb.

“It just felt good,” he said, “to be back in the mix with everybody today.”

The landscape of sports is littered with the injured and forgotten, and no one’s hurt is more deeply felt than that of the next guy. But for the same reason there are never right guard controversies, it’s different when the starting quarterback winds up on crutches in midseason and the schedule goes on without him. To go from the most visible player on the field to out-of-sight/out-of-mind takes on a Twilight Zone feel, even for the egoless.

And so it went for Swogger in 2004. The Cougars were 3-3 with him as the pitcher of record when x-rays revealed a broken left foot, the final indignity of a season that saw him smacked around pretty hard. Understudy Alex Brink came on and – taking his share of licks, too – directed Wazzu to victories over UCLA and Washington in the final month of the season. This, of course, ratcheted up the drone of the brave and anonymous who coach at home and office by computer and are never short of good ideas.

The Apple Cup victory, in particular, failed to register with quite the special elation it should have, given that the Cougars hadn’t beaten UW in 42 Dawg years.

“I was happy for them,” Swogger said – the choice of pronoun telling, “but it was tough not being part of it. I had no resentment, but I almost felt like an outsider because I didn’t feel like I was part of the team at that point – I felt like I didn’t help or contribute at all. I might as well have been in the stands cheering. It wasn’t like I was part of the celebration.”

Some of that carried over to the spring. Still recovering from his injury, Swogger’s participation was mostly token and he was held out of scrimmages – during which time the Cougar offense seemed to find a rhythm it had lacked the previous fall.

And there was something else. When it came time to pick captains for the 2005 season, the Cougs – who’d voted Swogger one of their offensive captains his sophomore year – didn’t re-elect him.

Swogger could have been excused if he’d felt it was all passing him by.

Instead, he felt something else altogether.

Married over the winter, Swogger and his bride, Angie, found themselves subjects of the not-so-dreaded drop-in. A number of the Cougars’ offensive linemen would come over on a semi-regular basis – Swogger says to play cards, but reason suggests it was to eat – and the outsider began to feel like one of the in-crowd.

“I felt like I wasn’t doing a lot in the spring – I didn’t take any snaps,” he said. “But the guys did a lot to make me feel part of the team. It wasn’t good that I got hurt, but I think I built better relationships with some of the guys because of it. I got to know them a lot better – (Nick) Milhauser, (Bobby) Byrd, (Charles) Harris, those guys would come over all the time and we’d play spades or dominoes. I just feel that much more comfortable with these guys in front of me.

“I think if guys like you more, they’re going to try even harder to protect you better.”

Oh, and there was something else again. Coach Bill Doba didn’t take away his job.

Doba’s rationale has been unwavering – having won the job, Swogger didn’t deserve to lose it by injury. Just the same, Brink deserves a chance to compete for the position. But Doba wants to settle the issue soon, and it’s not as if Swogger is operating without pressure.

“You just look to see,” Doba said, “who’s most productive.”

Still, Swogger sees it as “a big step of faith.

“I don’t want to let him down,” he said, “and I don’t think I will.”

Swogger knows his numbers a year ago weren’t as inspiring as they could have been – a completion percentage under 50 percent and an efficiency rating among the lower echelon of Pac-10 passers. He’s confident they’ll pick up this fall, based on two different factors – the potential explosiveness of the offense in general, with playmakers like Jerome Harrison, Jason Hill, Michael Bumpus and Troy Bienemann, and the small changes the Cougars did make in the spring.

“We changed some complements to (pass) routes and some of the protections – not a whole lot, but it gives us the freedom to check out of stuff at the line if we see something,” he said. “I don’t think last year we were at the point where we felt comfortable enough to do that – I wasn’t. A lot of times I stayed in plays that I shouldn’t have stayed in. I went back and watched a lot of film this summer and there were a lot of (plays) I shouldn’t have stayed in. Now I’m at the point where I can change a play call on the field and I’m comfortable with that – and I think the coaches are comfortable with that.”

His comfort level is reflected in other ways, too – “mostly leadership stuff,” he said.

He remembers being adopted as a freshman by then-starter Jason Gesser and “how you could tell just being around him that it was his team.

“Nobody ever talked bad about Jason,” Swogger said. “I’m good friends with Matt Kegel, too, and he got bad-mouthed all the time. But that sort of thing kind of comes with being the quarterback. On the team, once the guys know that you’re the guy, they get behind you 100 percent. It’s not the same outside. Everybody thought Matt was going to be terrible – we’d just come off those 10-win seasons and things were going to go in the tank. Well, if Matt had played more than one year, he’d be in the NFL now. He was a good quarterback.

“Guys are just waiting for you to lead when you’re the quarterback.”

Which is why he’s not particularly bent out of shape that he’s no longer a captain.

“I still feel like one,” he said. “And when something needs to be said, a guy might say, ‘Swogs, say something.’ I don’t know, it’s like being president-elect or something. I’m one of the leaders on the team and I think the guys see me as a leader. The title isn’t leadership. Whether I have the title or not, I feel like I’m one of those guys.”