Please, will you say it ain’t so, Coach Price?
Published 9:28 am Friday, February 22, 2008
The word that WSU football coach Mike Price will go to the University of Alabama would have been hard to explain to those of my parents’ generation who were Cougars from their undergraduate days into their 90s and who, during their working years in Everett, watched Mike’s dad coach the community college team,
For them, nothing could be better than to have a local boy take over their beloved team and end six decades of frustration of futility by taking them twice to the Rose Bowl.
Doesn’t Mike know that he will never be at Alabama what he has been in Pullman? At WSU, he won where no one thought he could win. He was on his way to a place in the coaching pantheon with legendary football coach Babe Hollinsberry (Hollinsberry Fieldhouse), basketball coach Jack Friel (Friel Court), baseball coaches Buck Bailey and Bobo Brayton (Bailey-Brayton Field) and track coach Jack Mooberry (Mooberry Track).
Instead, he’s leaving with a losing streak against the Huskies and possibly without a victory in the Rose Bowl, and he’s going to Alabama, where several coaches have been unable to follow Bear Bryant, and where the team is on probation.
So, there will be no Price Building at WSU, and Mike will just be that funny Western guy, trying to rebuild the Crimson Tide.
Sure, he’ll make $1.5 million a year, but wasn’t the $900,000 he got with this year’s incentives enough, and won’t he miss having his Lake Coeur d’Alene summer home close by?
Ready for the Seattle Bowl?
The second annual Seattle Bowl Dec. 30 will match Oregon and Wake Forest in a football game between two teams who have lost a combined 11 games
In fact, the 56 teams in the 28 bowl games have lost 215 games. And Wake Forest is one of seven teams from the nine-team Atlantic Coast Conference– a group of colleges better known for basketball – to make it to a bowl game.
The Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton bowls are tradition, but do you suppose the Oregon coach told his players a few months ago, “Even if we lose to Washington, Washington State and Oregon State, we can still get a holiday match with Wake Forest.”
We’d like to know what you think. If you have a comment send it to
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Evan Smith is the Enterprise forum editor.
