Cougars have nowhere to go but up

PULLMAN – The first game can’t come soon enough and it comes too soon.

Football at Washington State University reconvened Tuesday under both a hot sun and the scattered clouds left over from four bowl-less seasons, the repossession of eight scholarships by the NCAA transcript cops and a mountain of misdemeanors going back two years.

No wonder the new sheriff in town – sorry – wiped his brow after the first workout and admitted, “It feels like it was a couple of years since I was able to coach a ballgame – that much has gone on in the last eight months.”

Of course, moments later Paul Wulff sighed and said, “Now we have a deadline.”

Twenty-four days, he means, before the Cougars’ 2008 opener against Oklahoma State in Seattle.

This seems hardly enough time for a team with a new coaching staff, a new no-huddle approach, an unproven quarterback and an underperforming defense to get it together. So it’s no surprise that the Cougars are pretty much a consensus pick to finish 10th in the Pacific-10 Conference, save for a small pocket of jokers who predict 11th.

Not that the disdain was going to register so much as a blip on opening day.

Practice proceeded as if the Cougars actually, you know, have a chance this season. Defensive backs drilled on everything including the proper way to recover a fumble. Jeshua Anderson blew in from his latest heat of the intermediate hurdles and blew past coverages. Assistant coach Steve Broussard tipped overturned garbage cans this way and that as if playing an oversized shell game, simulating the eye-blink opening and closing of running lanes.

“Give me explosion,” he demanded of his backs.

For two hours in the morning and more in the afternoon, the Cougs were implored to give all they have – because Wulff and his staff have to know how much that is.

When he was promoted into his first head coaching job up the road at Eastern Washington in 2000, Wulff had already put seven years into the program. He knew the players better than they knew themselves.

“Here, we still don’t know these guys – not yet,” Wulff said. “We don’t know if when they’re stressed and tired, are they going to still give it everything they’ve got or are they going to lay down? We need to know. We have to find what guys are going to give it all when times are toughest.”

Yeah, but couldn’t that take all season?

“It could,” he allowed, “but we want to find as many answers as we can this camp. That’s why it has to be a tough, physical camp.”

Even – maybe especially – for veterans like offensive lineman Dan Rowlands.

“I have to prove that I can play,” said Rowlands. “I haven’t done anything for them yet.”

Of course, the Cougars have more to prove than whether they can simply play – though a significant segment of their congregation would settle for that.

The misbehavior and academic-based attrition that came to a head this spring – and makes actual games such a welcome diversion – wasn’t just bad PR, it was symptomatic of a team culture that had grown too lax, too indifferent, too beaten. The Cougars might like to tell themselves that all the bad press – specifically the lengthy report in the Seattle Times – stretched the truth and that they’re unlucky to live in the most overpoliced burg in the West, but better they simply tell themselves to knock it off.

Which, to an extent, they have. The team grade-point average has climbed to never-before-reached highs. The team took Wulff’s no-bars fiat from the spring and extended it into the summer, policing themselves.

“It happened one time and we were out at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday running,” Rowland said. “It never happened again.”

Still, the no-tolerance crowd may be troubled with prominent offenders Xavier Hicks and Andy Mattingly suited up after being found guilty of creative assaults with rubbing alcohol and a skillet, respectively – though Hicks will sit the first three games. Andy Roof, already bounced from WSU once, is practicing while awaiting a school judgment on his involvement in a spring fracas.

A harder line would have sent a welcome and necessary message, but Wulff is comfortable with the call he’s made. And it’s not as if there’s any firm penance price list. But these days, it’s just easier to applaud Kentucky and Wisconsin for booting their bad boys this week than it is to feel good about the more measured suspensions at Michigan and Georgia.

Really, what’s wrong in demanding that scholarship athletes behave?

“We’ve stressed accountability – in everything they do,” Wulff said. “What they have to understand is that they’re employees of the state of Washington, and there are expectations to live up to.

“We have to build these guys up as people first. Once we start making some headway in that department, then we can get to the football field. And I think we’ve made some headway as quickly as we could. But now we have a football season in front of us.”

Too soon, and not soon enough.