POLL: Which of the state’s football losses was the worst?

It was an ugly weekend for football in the state of Washington.

The Seattle Seahawks, Washington Huskies and Washington State Cougars have always been a source of local pride. Particularly since 2013, the season the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, it’s been a Pacific Northwest party as the three teams combined to go 199-109 in the seven seasons from 2013-19, including six NFL playoff appearances and 13 college bowl games. That’s a lot of winning — and a lot of postgame celebrating for the fans.

But the past weekend was a rock-bottom moment for State of Washington football in recent years as the Huskies lost 31-26 at home against Stanford, the Cougars lost 38-13 at USC and the Seahawks lost 17-12 at home against the New York Giants.

To get an idea of how rare that occurrence is, the last time all three teams lost in the same weekend was Nov. 5-6, 2011, when the Seahawks fell 23-13 at Dallas, the Huskies were beat 34-17 at home by Oregon and the Cougars lost 30-7 at California. How different an era it was then? Paul Wulff was coaching the Cougars, Nick Montana was the quarterback in waiting at Washington, and Russell Wilson was slinging touchdown passes not for the Seahawks, but for the University of Wisconsin.

So it’s understandable if you’re feeling a little shell-shocked in the aftermath of this weekend’s results.

Between the @Seahawks @UW_Football & @WSUCougarFB that’s as bad a 180 minutes of football we’ve seen in the Pacific NW in a long, long, long time
— Brock Huard (@BrockHuard) December 7, 2020

It wasn’t just the fact that all three teams lost, it was the nature of those losses that made it even worse. Consider:

On Saturday afternoon the Huskies were bowled over by a Stanford rushing attack that chewed up both ground and clock as the Cardinal raced to a 24-3 halftime lead. When Washington threatened to mount a big second-half comeback for the second week in a row, Stanford kept converting third-and-long to run off the final 7 minutes, 54 seconds. This was a Stanford team that was forced from its home because of California coronavirus restrictions and spent the week prepping for the game at Bellevue public parks.
On Sunday afternoon the Seahawks, a team with Super Bowl aspirations, took an awful loss against a Giants team that came into the game 4-7 and was forced to start journeyman back-up quarterback Colt McCoy, who hadn’t won an NFL game since 2014. Wilson and the Seahawks’ offense looked nothing like the unit that spent the first half of the season terrorizing opposing defenses, and Seattle surrendered first place in the NFC West to the Los Angeles Rams on a tiebreaker.
Finally, late Sunday afternoon, the Cougars looked like they never got off the plane in their loss to USC. The Trojans led 28-0 in the first quarter, with WSU suffering the ignominy of watching the same player (Amon-Ra St. Brown) score all four touchdowns. There was little doubt which team recovered from its coronavirus-inflicted layoff best.

Indeed, it was all hard to take for the state’s football fan base. It would have been a good weekend for everyone to emulate that infamous popcorn-guzzling WSU fan from the Cougars’ blowout loss against Stanford in 2013.