Washington State shouts down college football’s hierarchy with Apple Cup win

As millions of us warped sorts continue to behold and ingest the wonders of college football, let us never underestimate the crucial role of snobbery. Snobbery has shaped college football for most of its 155 years, and snobbery still alights every week in many a somewhere. We see snobbery when a fan base presumes itself superior to that derelict fan base down the interstate, or harrumphs that its program should not ever lose to that program from a lesser division, or abandons conference brethren when the brethren doesn’t coax enough TV money. There’s a snobbery construct in many a state, not just Texas.

Snobbery helps construct hierarchy. Hierarchy lends charm to the upsets.

What a good season already for anti-snobbery, this 2024.

Already we have seen a long-since-good Northern Illinois program go to Notre Dame and win, dredging tears from its coach and wreaking crisis for a home side generally entitled to victories over such underlings. We’ve seen UNLV come from a tier presumed lower to win at Houston and Kansas even though those latter two aren’t snobs per se. Florida State built enough snobbery through its Bobby Bowden years with all the 10-win seasons that its president and others began seeing the rest of the ACC as unworthy, and now it’s 0-3 with a classic anti-snobbery loss to visiting Memphis on Saturday. Mississippi State certainly doesn’t commit much snobbery, but it does sustain membership in the SEC, so it can’t see its 41-17 loss to Toledo on Saturday as acceptable.

Yet the Saturday just gone by brought the anti-snobbery coup de grâce. It brought as meaningful a win as will happen across the coming months, at least pre-playoff. It happened in an NFL stadium among 57,567 in Seattle, halved for each side, and it found its trembling crux when Washington, the defending national runner-up even as its stars left to dot the NFL and Alabama, had a first-and-goal from the Washington State 9-yard line with two minutes to play and Washington State ahead by 24-19.

Breathe.

Now, there’s background. There’s the background of the Apple Cup rivalry, a set-to so entrenched it began in 1900, when the teams played to a 5-5 tie in Seattle and everyone went home slightly bummed and unimpressed by the rare-score accomplishment. They disliked each other so much that in 1945, they played twice. And then there’s the more recent, tectonic-shift background. Washington had joined those Pac-12 schools who saw themselves as superior to the Pac-12 TV money, fleeing for the rich Big Ten and helping to leave Washington State and Oregon State abandoned, as if unworthy, without a major conference after decades and decades in a major conference.

As Washington State coach Jake Dickert put it to reporters in Seattle late Saturday, “I just think we’re at such a critical time for Washington State football,” with the future murky and the Apple Cup bizarrely nonconference.

Washington’s Jonah Coleman ran right for a loss of one, corralled by a native of the state, edge rusher Andrew Edson, bringing second and goal.

“Growing up, to be honest,” Edson would tell reporters, “I’m playing this game.”

Washington quarterback Will Rogers threw incomplete down the middle, bringing third and goal.

“We talked about it being a week’s worth of work,” Dickert would tell reporters. “It wasn’t a week’s worth of work. It was nine-and-a-half months. Grinding, staying together, working. Our captain, Nusi Milani, in the players’ meeting, he said, ‘We’re not gonna beat this team because we hate these guys, we’re gonna beat this team because we love each other.’”

And while that reiterated the idea of the value of listening to an edge rusher, Washington operated from the 10-yard line, and Rogers hit Denzel Boston to the right, and the play gained … 9 yards. Stephen Hall, for two seasons a Cougar, managed to get Boston out of bounds with 72 seconds left, meaning a defensive back from Memphis who had played at Northwest Mississippi Community College ought to get a place in the lore in the Pacific Northwest. Here came fourth and goal.

“I remember I put my helmet down,” said wide receiver Josh Meredith from San Diego, who starred with seven receptions for 111 yards and a touchdown. “I walked over. I was behind the crowd, I was just holding my stuff like this” – hands to chest – “like, ‘Get the stop. Get the stop. Get the stop.’ ”

In the simultaneous thrill and cruelty of sport, the hopes of the abandoned hinged on one play, and eventually that play did snap. Rogers began heading right with a back outside him in what resembled an option play. And while a defense was about to win the eternal love of those steadfast, mistreated Washington State fans, two guys in particular barged into the future storybooks.

One, Edson, a four-season Cougar from Snoqualmie, population 13,000-ish, 28 miles east of Seattle, began dealing with a block and maybe even a hold, but in the mass of flesh you could see his large left arm begin to fight its way out in a lunge.

“I see Rogers,” Edson said.

He would grab Rogers as the quarterback traveled along the line, and it would send Rogers into predicament.

“I hit him,” Edson said.

As Rogers’s option options dwindled …

“He pitched it,” Edson said.

… the ball went to Coleman near the right sideline, where a six-season Cougar turned up and so turned up forever in the fans’ warm memories. He’s Kyle Thornton, a linebacker from Upland in California’s Inland Empire, and when he corralled Coleman near the sideline for a 2-yard loss, there began a feeling that might as well last the rest of the century and maybe even beyond.

“Game over,” Edson said.

Dickert looked around through his joy and saw that greatest thing about sports: the relationships. “Just to see these guys, and the celebrations, and the relationships that have been built,” he told reporters.

He summarized: “And if you can’t get behind this team, in this moment, at this time, I just don’t know what else more we can do. Right, because these guys stayed here for this. For this moment. Right? To bring this trophy back to Pullman (250 miles east-southeast of Seattle), it’s gonna be in the third floor of the CFC (football building) if anybody wants to come out and see it. I think we might retire this trophy. I think it’s the Pac-12 trophy. I think that might stay in our place for a long time, and we’ll bring a new one next year, a little Big Ten/Pac-12, we’ll put the new score on it. So we might retire this one as the Pac-12 trophy and stay in Pullman.”

“This win was, being from Washington, I can’t tell you how much this win means to me,” Edson said, and it had lived in the dreams of a kid who became 6 -foot-3 and 253 pounds. And that’s when he said the part about growing up and “playing” the Apple Cup, and then he told reporters, “And you’re always thinking it might be your time. And the play came to me, and it was amazing.”

It was amazing, all right. It had bucked the fresh hierarchy, the old snobbery and the dreary TV-money tyranny.