Fight, fight, fight…?

You get used to the bottom of the standings when you’ve grown up a Coug.  It’s what makes those times when everything goes right, those years of Rose and Holiday and Aloha Bowls, so incredible.  Inevitably, though, the world is righted and WSU sinks toward the bottom of the standings again.

I have never seen the student section so empty fifteen minutes before kickoff at Martin Stadium

But I can’t remember us ever sinking this low.

There’s something personal about being a fan; something that is bigger than yourself.  It’s not just me and the team that I am referring to when I write “I can’t remember us ever sinking this low.”  It’s all the fans who sat through the beating dished out by the Trojans yesterday at Martin Stadium.  It’s all the fans who listened to Bob Robertson on the radio and the fans who read about it in newspapers and blogs the next morning.

We, the team and the fans, have hit bottom.  There is no better demonstration than this than the empty student section just minutes before the game along with the apathetic play on the field and the unbelievable pathetic play calling by the coaching staff.

But these are easy observations to write about.  I’m going to put on my Yellow Hat to try to come up with positive, supportive observations a day remove from our worst ever loss:

• The whole “longest win streak in the country” monkey is finally off our back.  It is sort of a bogus stat anyway because to say that we have been consistently competitive since 1981 is complete bullshit.  With that pressure gone, the team can start looking forward instead of backward.
• Next week is a bye week.  Think of this loss in the terms of getting too drunk.  The next morning, you’ve all said it, declaring “I will never drink again.”  You did drink again, and even drank way too much again, what you needed was some time to recuperate.  Sure it hurt like hell.  A drunk like this, or a loss like this, just take a little extra time to get over.  The bye week provides that.
• We’ve played four of the five top teams in the Pac 10. Only Arizona, at home on November 8th, remains.  You can also throw in Arizona State as one of the better teams of the Pac 10 that are left on our schedule, but other than that we’re matching up with teams that we might be able to compete with.
• The rose is off the bloom for Coach Wulff and his staff.  If Wulff is the coach and motivator that Jim Sterk thought he was getting maybe yesterday’s shit can somehow be turned into tomorrow’s fertilizer.

Or, maybe the sky is falling.  Maybe bringing in a coach from Eastern Washington University wasn’t the right decision.  Maybe we will never recover from the loss of Mike Price or the gap between recruiting in Pullman and Los Angeles just got too big to overcome.  I don’t like thinking that way, though.  I want to believe that this team, this coaching staff, these players, can turn it around and we can finish the season playing at a level that we can all be proud of.  Maybe I’m a dreamer, I just hope I’m not the only one.