Cougars stress bowl goal

PULLMAN – Basketball season is not long in the rearview mirror, and yet football is here.

Washington State begins its spring practices Thursday, ready to make another run at reaching a bowl game in the fall.

“I’m a little disappointed because I haven’t been to a bowl game since my redshirt freshman year,” senior defensive tackle Aaron Johnson said. “Most of the guys on the team have never been to one.”

Not one Cougar in camp this spring has played in a bowl game at WSU, a fact that only adds to the urgency as it begins preparations for the season ahead.

Spring workouts, which conclude with the team’s final scrimmage on April 14, are always about finding younger players to replace those who have left the program from the previous season. But for this team, it’ll also be about cleaning out whatever memories are left from 2006.

Those events of last season seem to have shaped the work ethic that will send the Cougars into this spring.

“I think the biggest thing is getting the taste out of our mouth from last season,” said quarterback Alex Brink, who will go into his fourth year as a WSU starter this fall. “It’s hard to create a formula for a one-year turnaround. Part of our situation is understanding the mistakes that we’ve made in the past and learning from that. We felt like we did so well at finishing games and learning from ‘05, and then when we got to that sixth win, it was like, ‘Well, we’re here.’ And we weren’t. I think that’s something that everybody realizes. You get to that point in the season, you can’t take it for granted.”

WSU will have to replace some departed players, but the mission is clear for returning veterans: Get the Cougars back to a bowl game.

“Even more so, it’s to not shoot for the low bar, not to shoot to get to six (wins) or to get to seven, but (instead), ‘What can we do to put ourselves in position so that in November we know that we’re going to a game?’ ” Brink said. “That’s the important part. That’s something that the seniors and juniors that have been around for a while understand.”