Morning links: Basketball season begins Friday

The Washington State basketball team will begin official practices on Friday, before the football team plays a Pac-12 game.

It’s crazy how time flies. Almost as crazy as how different the Cougars will look in their second year with Ernie Kent at the helm. There will be seven new contributors this year, and they’re big. Like, really big. Conor Clifford is humongous and Valentine Izundu is humongous lite.

The Cougars are really good, too, at least according to Kent. He was a veritable barrel of positivity at WSU’s Media Day yesterday. You can read more about that in our story for today’s paper , and watch videos of Kent , Ike Iroegbu and Que Johnson , and Josh Hawkinson alongside Clifford .

But it wasn’t all basketball yesterday. Mike Leach and the football team held their weekly press conference, and we’ve got our weekly football notebook to pass along. We also have videos of Leach , Taylor Taliulu , Luke Falk and Parker Henry . Stefanie Loh takes a look at the Cougars through a national lens .

Connor Letourneau covers the Golden Bears and has a story about Cal’s new penchant for takeaways .

A big win in the desert healed USC’s wounds, but the Trojans can’t afford to take another punch. … People are starting to whisper about Utah in the playoffs, but that chatter is still too loud for the Utes. … The UW ground game worked against Cal. So why didn’t the Huskies use it ?