Cougs revive Thanksgiving Alpo spirit

So Washington State, by way of shedding a potential and extraneous game with Gonzaga, is ceding the territory of Alaska to the Zags and playing a tournament in … Spokane?

Welcome to the brave new world of college basketball scheduling, a critter that seemingly can’t be corralled no matter how much rope you bring to the rodeo.

We’ll try to sort out the ironies in a minute. But, yes, the Cougars have excused themselves from participation in the Great Alaska Shootout this fall and will instead host a college basketball tournament – a round-robin, more precisely – on Thanksgiving weekend at the Spokane Arena.

The school will not reveal any of the participating teams until contracts are signed. But it will include the University of Montana and probably Mississippi Valley State, and Air Force has also been approached about playing.

The format will mirror that of the John Thompson Foundation Classic in Milwaukee last fall that launched the Cougars on a 3-0 start to their spectacular 26-8 season. The Cougars will play each of the guest teams as part of doubleheaders on three consecutive days – and as an “exempt” tournament (or, in NCAAspeak, a “qualifying regular-season multiple-team event”), the three games will count as only one against the NCAA limit of 28.

“It’s a chance to have three games in Spokane instead of three on a distant court,” said WSU coach Tony Bennett. “We had a schedule that was heavy on games that took us away from home and we wanted to try to balance that out a little bit. If everything goes as we hope, we have an opportunity to do that.”

And it eliminates the possibility of the Cougars and Gonzaga meeting in Anchorage in advance of their annual series game, this year to be played in Spokane. The Zags remain part of the Shootout field that also includes Butler, Liberty, Michigan, Texas Tech, Western Kentucky and host Alaska Anchorage.

“I don’t think there’s any upside (to playing Gonzaga twice),” said WSU assistant Ron Sanchez, who coordinates scheduling. “It doesn’t benefit either one of us.”

Yes, a prelim would be something of a drain on the Zags-Cougs drama, though not necessarily for the Shootout nor its television partner, ESPN. But locally, the intrigue figures to be all the greater now that the Cougars have three warmups here in town.

And those of us with a grasp of history can’t help but be amused at the development of the Cougs being all jazzed about a holiday tournament in Spokane.

They were once partners in the late, occasionally lamented Alpo Classic with the Zags, Eastern Washington and Idaho – a season-tipoff event at the old Spokane Coliseum where the schools split up 6,000 tickets to sell and hoped the area would get energized about basketball. It didn’t happen for any number of reasons, not the least of which was Idaho winning all three tournaments.

(Even the Vandals – or at least coach Tim Floyd – didn’t see the point; one year he growled at his players not to exchange so much as a high five during the trophy presentation, lest they lose focus on the bigger picture. Whatever it was. Getting him a better job, probably.)

Wazzu’s emotional investment in the Alpo was, to be generous, indifferent. One year the Cougars’ ticket sales were the worst of the four schools, which was a little like the Girl Scout with 10 aunts and uncles peddling fewer boxes of Do-si-dos than three orphans.

But that was four regimes ago, and the Cougars have grown incrementally smarter about the need for a presence in Spokane – though playing Pac-10 games here was barely the lesser of two evils.

“We’d love to do something like this again,” Bennett said. “If we can put together something when our students are gone, especially with the support we’re getting, it makes sense.”

But this year won’t be every year. The Cougs needed to balance a schedule that has them playing in Seattle against a foe not yet determined and road games at GU, Boise State (a return date), Idaho State (part of a 2-for-1 exchange) and Baylor in the Pac-10/Big 12 challenge “which will allow us to bring a quality opponent to Pullman in future years,” Sanchez said.

So this is not Son of Alpo. Proponents of a resurrection of that format – and they’re out there – say it makes all kinds of sense, especially now that all four are in different leagues, but the fact is it’s no longer needed to goose interest in college basketball here the way it was so desperately in the late 1980s. Gonzaga has already done that, and the Cougs have done it again, and now their scheduling agendas have taken them in different directions.

In Wazzu’s case, to Spokane. Who would have bet a bowl of Alpo on that?