Year makes a difference
PULLMAN – Nothing has changed atop the quarterbacking depth chart from last season to this spring, but in a sense everything is different for Washington State starter Alex Brink.
For the last two seasons Brink has been locked in a positional battle with Josh Swogger – a contest he won last August but still had to worry about with every loss during a 4-7 season.
Now Swogger has moved on, transferring to Montana for his final season, and Brink stands alone as the man running the Cougars offense, his junior season on the horizon.
“It was something that I was able to really benefit from,” Brink said of the competition. “It helped me develop. At the same time, now I’m glad I’m in a position where if I make a mistake I don’t have to worry about if I’m going to get the starting position. I can learn from the mistakes and get better. That’s important now.”
Brink took nearly all of the significant snaps last spring with Swogger held out of contact drills because of injury. But it wasn’t until fall camp when Brink wrested the job away from his teammate.
Brink now has 16 career starts under his belt, making him the Cougars’ first established, experienced starter to enter a season since Jason Gesser led WSU to the Rose Bowl in the fall of 2002.
“Just knowing him and being his coach, he’s trying to take what he learned from last year and continue to grow from that,” quarterbacks coach Timm Rosenbach said. “I know his main concern now is just our team: Where can we be at the end of spring ball? What are we going to be like coming into fall camp? That’s what his main concern is and that’s what we all like it to be.”
But Brink’s tenure as WSU quarterback has irrevocably been shaped by his duel with Swogger.
Brink is clearly more relaxed now, the chip on his shoulder shaved down by the lack of a real challenger. Yet instead of forgetting the past two years, he’s embracing the lessons they provided.
“You learn a certain amount of mental toughness,” he said. “You learn how to be focused and how to take practice seriously because every rep really counts for you. Those things have helped me.
“Both Josh and I wanted to play, and we both competed like we wanted to play every practice. That’s what made it fun. Every practice was a competition. Every practice was a game for us, because we had to go out and do our best, not just in our team stuff but in the individual stuff.”
Even though he was chosen as starter last season and took every significant snap, 2005 was not always a positive for Brink.
Putting up strong statistics as a sophomore meant little when the team lost its first seven Pac-10 games – especially when many of those losses were so close, and contained critical errors by Brink himself.
Just more than four months after he helped snap that losing streak with a victory in the Apple Cup, Brink has found the words the rationalize what happened to him and his team last season.
Even if he hasn’t entirely forgotten past the disappointments.
“At times I would, for whatever reason, start off hot or start off slow and then the next half would be the complete opposite,” he said. “It’s one of those things where I’m smart enough that I’m not going to blame myself for everything, but if those mistakes didn’t happen it would have affected the outcome. Like at Oregon State, that jumps out. If those plays don’t happen, it’s certainly going to be a different ballgame. Focus is an issue.”
For the first time in his career, Brink can focus solely on the task ahead – not the player beside him.
“To be in a position,” he said, “where I can be a leader and be a coach in some ways to the younger guys – to be comfortable in my own role – definitely feels good.”