Cougars get their chance to even score
PULLMAN – A small handful of Washington State students attempted to begin camping out just beyond the Beasley Coliseum walls days ago to ensure the best seats for tonight’s game between the 13th-ranked Cougars and No. 2 UCLA.
The ploy didn’t work, as building employees and campus police shooed the students away, with the intent of keeping a line from forming until 6 a.m. today. Rest assured, though, once the line starts to form, it will stretch further than a half-court heave from the building.
After all, this is the biggest game in more than a decade to be played in Pullman. The Bruins occupy the top spot in the Pac-10 and can clinch a conference title with a win at 7:30 p.m. today. The Cougars are in second and constitute the lone threat to UCLA’s dreams of an outright conference championship.
It’s been more than two full months since these teams last played, when UCLA won 55-52 at home on Dec. 28.
“After we lost to them down there and it was so close, I think everyone down there circled this game here, like we’re going to get them at home. We’ve got a chance,” WSU’s Robbie Cowgill said. “We’re really looking forward to this all season. Pretty much as soon as that OSU game was over (Saturday) and we put it away, I immediately started thinking about this one and got excited. It’s really all the players have been able to talk about, even on the trip back from Oregon. That’s just how excited we are to play that game. There’s just a lot of buzz around campus.”
Any doubt that the memories of that first loss are still strong in the minds of WSU’s players dissipate after just a few moments.
“Going 0 for 5, that’s stuck in my mind,” Daven Harmeling said, thinking back to his uncharacteristically off night shooting in Pauley Pavilion. “I’d like to think that I’m better than that. My teammates need me to be better than that. I feel like I cost the team the game. Hopefully, I can rebound and have a better performance the second time.”
If there is any guarantee in tonight’s game, it probably has nothing to do with individual performances.
The Cougars and Bruins have played each other to the wire in almost every recent matchup, and the two teams’ penchant for aggressive defense would indicate that nothing different should be expected this time around.
“The story’s going to unfold on the court. It’s going to be a possession-by-possession story,” Cougars coach Tony Bennett said. “Down the stretch in games, very rarely will they beat themselves. They don’t flinch. They don’t screw up a lot. They’re just rock solid. They play like a conference champion of a year ago, a runner-up national champion. To beat a team like that, you have to be right.”
Certainly, though, this particular matchup has a lot more sizzle than the previous ones, mainly because WSU is no longer just the surprising underdog but instead the primary threat to UCLA’s reign atop the Pac-10. If that’s hard to believe, all the evidence one would need will be lined up in the cold outside Beasley Coliseum.
“At that time, we had no idea that this was where we were going to be at,” Cowgill said, thinking back to the first meeting. “We had no expectation of rankings or media coverage or that stuff. I’m hoping it’s the same hungry team, and hoping it’s more because we owe them one.”
Notes
Derrick Low and Kyle Weaver were both named first-team players on the National Association of Basketball Coaches’ all-District 14 team. … Both games this week are sold out. … The Cougars will raise a banner tonight honoring the 1917 team, which was called a national champion by the Helms Athletic Foundation decades later. That team still holds the school record for wins in a season with 25, a mark threatened by this season’s 23-5 team 90 years later.